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LADY GAGA x TERRY RICHARDSON
by Lady Gaga, Terry Richardson
Release Date: November 22, 2011

Buy new: $50.00 $28.52

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Product Description
In this book of original, behind-the-scenes photographs, acclaimed photographer Terry Richardson follows superstar Lady Gaga during one year of her life, from Lollapalooza through the final show of her Monster Ball tour. During the time period he followed Gaga, Richardson took over 100,000 images and attended more than 30 Monster Ball dates around the world. From the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards to the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal rally in Portland, Maine, to the Thierry Mugler show at Maxime, Paris, Richardson captures Lady Gaga as you’ve never seen her before. A year-long global odyssey- -all access, nothing off limits–this is the book Lady Gaga fans have been waiting for.

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Popularity: 8% [?]

According to a USA Today/Gallup poll conducted last week, two-thirds of Facebook users overall were unaware of the new features recently adopted at the social networking site. However, 87 percent of the respondents using Facebook on a daily basis said they were up to speed with the Web site’s latest update.

Consumer advocacy groups have raised concerns about the latest additions to Facebook and how they might be used by criminals. Nevertheless, just 26 percent of the new poll’s respondents who said they visit Facebook every day were “very concerned” about their online privacy, USA Today reported in an article published Tuesday.

A majority of Facebook users (56 percent) disapproved of the latest changes while only 36 percent said they liked them. Nevertheless, 30 percent indicated they visited the popular social networking site several times a day, and with 29 percent using Facebook on a daily basis.

“If there’s one thing Facebook is not afraid of, it’s change,” said Forrester Research Senior Analyst Sean Corcoran.

Laying Claim To Users’ Lives

For Facebook the goal is to radically change the online social networking game by laying claim to the entire life experience of each and every participant using its Web site, according to Corcoran.

For example, Facebook has been testing a new Timeline feature that “recaps in one fell swoop everything you’ve ever posted and lets you feature the highlights,” Corcoran wrote in a blog. There are also “new apps that let you discover and share real-time experiences like watching movies and listening to music.”

The principal benefit for Facebook is that the new features will deliver highly granular data on individual users that Facebook’s advertising clients can harness to more precisely target their marketing efforts at the social networking site. With the latest changes, for example, advertisers will be able to launch innovative… Read more

Popularity: 2% [?]

Amazon is the current tech-media darling after the smashing successful unveiling of its Kindle Fire, complete with its Silk browser and cloud services. Now, some speculate that Amazon will buy what remains of Palm from Hewlett-Packard.

According to media reports, Amazon is in deep negotiations with HP to buy Palm, creator of the webOS operating system that runs on HP’s failed TouchPad. HP paid $1.2 billion for Palm and has decided to kill webOS hardware projects after failing to execute on its strategic plan for the assets.

“Amazon has one device that’s based on Kindle OS and one that’s based on Android. They need to focus on getting all their devices on the same OS so they can have some fun and games with applications,” said Michael Disabato, vice president of network and telecom at Gartner. “It’s possible that Amazon is looking at webOS because Google is taking Android out of the public domain.”

Amazon-Palm Connections

The rumors around Amazon buying webOS aren’t completely far-fetched. Palm CEO Jon Rubenstein sits on Amazon’s board of directors. And Rubenstein has publicly stated that Amazon would make a great partner in expanding the webOS ecosystem. And that’s just the problem: the lack of a robust webOS ecosystem.

“WebOS still doesn’t have as much of an ecosystem as Android or iOS. So without any apps why would anyone want it? People are buying the iPads because they look sleek and they are fancy, but when you come down to it they don’t care about what’s inside it,” Disabato said. “It’s all about the applications.”

In fact, Disabato reasoned that a lack of apps is one of the reasons HP decided to shutter its tablet business. From his point of view, the only reason the HP TouchPad flew off the shelf at $99 was because many consumers believe they can find… Details

Popularity: 55% [?]

With the iPhone 5 about be unveiled, the rumor mill is working overtime. In fact, even the invitation for the Oct. 4 event, which reads “Let’s talk iPhone,” has sprouted rumors that the new model will offer new voice-recognition features that could transform the way smartphone interaction works.

Previous Apple invitations have included hints about the coming product. If the “let’s talk” invitation is a hint, the voice-recognition features could represent a fully integrated voice-control interface that accompanies, and in some cases replaces, the touch interaction.

iPhone, Come Here

This new voice control could include the ability for a voice-based virtual assistant to access data stored in calendar, contacts, music files and other locations, and use them in conversations between the device and the user. The possibility of new voice features is supported by the fact that Apple bought voice-recognition application provider Siri in 2010. The company has previously released some voice-to-text features.

Various Apple-watching sites are describing the voice-recognition features as a dramatic change, not only allowing the user to schedule an appointment or find a retailer, but offering a revolutionary voice-based interface that once again changes the expectation for smartphones. The aptly named Assistant, according to some reports, will also be able to ask the user questions if, for instance, it’s not clear which phone number to use.

Hopes that the newest iPhone could support 4G transmission technology are not high, given reports that the company is waiting for smaller and less power-hungry 4G chips that won’t be available until 2012. There have been reports in past months that the company was testing iPhones with 4G Long-Term Evolution support, but the consensus is that, for Apple, elegant style will triumph over speed, at least until the new LTE chips are available.

A research vice president from China Unicom was quoted this week… More info

Popularity: 2% [?]

In a move to beef up Oracle’s hardware line, CEO Larry Ellison has introduced the concept of the all-in-one data center. Ellison offered his take on the new products at Oracle OpenWorld on Sunday that combine the server, storage and network in a single, highly integrated box.

In his talk to 40,000 conference-goers, Ellison spelled out the advantages of parallel computing and demonstrated the latest and greatest Sparc Solaris computer. He also took the lid off Oracle’s new Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine.

“How do we make this thing to go 10 times faster? Parallel everything,” Ellison said. “Lots and lots of parallel network connections moving enormous amounts of data in parallel. That’s how you make this thing go faster.”

Parallel Computing Power

Oracle is positioning Exalytics as the first engineered system featuring in-memory software and hardware and an optimized Business Intelligence platform with advanced visualization. Internal tests comparing Oracle Exalytics with standard BI software and off-the-shelf hardware show relational online analytical processing (ROLAP) reporting and dashboard performance improvements of up to 20 times, and multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP) modeling performance gains of up to 79 times.

“Oracle has been doing a lot of work in parallel computing, which has improved performance, particularly in the T4 Sparc systems that were announced last week,” said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT. “With the Exalytics solution, Oracle has a product it can put up against the IBM Smart Analytics System that has been out for two years now.”

As King sees it, IBM, as well as other vendors, have demonstrated that improving data throughput and database performance is a viable business model. With Exalytics, Oracle is working to carve out a bigger piece of the market. But King isn’t sure Ellison is taking the right approach with his OracleWorld presentation.

Ellison’s Engineering Rhetoric

“What’s interesting about it is that the rhetoric coming… Read more

Popularity: 3% [?]

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Kindle Fire, Full Color 7″ Multi-touch Display, Wi-Fi
by Amazon

Buy new: $199.00
2 used & new from $199.00

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Product Description
Movies, apps, games, music, reading and more, plus Amazon’s revolutionary cloud-accelerated web browser – 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines and books – Amazon Appstore – thousands of popular apps and games – Ultra-fast web browsing – Amazon Silk – Free cloud storage for all your Amazon content – Vibrant color touchscreen with extra-wide viewing angle – Fast, powerful dual-core processor – Amazon Prime members enjoy unlimited, instant streaming of over 10,000 popular movies and TV shows

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Popularity: 4% [?]

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Chicks with Guns
by Lindsay McCrum
Publication Date: October 1, 2011

Buy new: $45.00 $29.70
6 used & new from $26.99

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Product Description

In Chicks with Guns, Lindsay McCrum has created a cultural portrait of women gun owners in America through photographs that are both beautiful and in a sense unexpected. The book examines issues of self-image and gender through the visual conventions of portraiture and fashion, but the guns are presented here not as superimposed props but as the very personal lifestyle accessories of the subjects portrayed. And it defies stereotypes often associated with aspects of the popular culture of both guns and women. Like the 15-20 million women gun owners in this country, the women we meet in Chicks with Guns ( their portraits are accompanied by their own words), reside in all regions of the country, come from all levels of society, and participate seriously in diverse shooting activities. The women here are sportswomen, hunters, and competition shooters. Some use guns on their jobs and some for self-defense. They may not all be classically beautiful, but in these photographs they all look beautiful, exuding honesty, confidence, poise, power and pride. They are real women with real guns that play a part in their lives. By focusing her camera respectfully on this particular aspect of the American scene, gun-wielding women and girls, Lindsay McCrum sheds new light on who we are in America today. 

Praise for Chicks with Guns:

“Don’t be deceived by the frisky title: Lindsay McCrum’s Chicks with Guns is a deadly (sorry) serious work of cultural iconography. It’s also visually stunning, alternately sexy, arresting, haunting and mesmerizing. In so many words, this book hits every bull’s-eye—a real stunner.” — Christopher Buckley, author of Thank You for Smoking and Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir

“A work of art in photography, Chicks with Guns is an instant classic. Any who read the text and reflect on the stunning portraits will come away with a new appreciation of the not unusual or surprising love affair between women and their firearms.” —R. L. Wilson, firearms expert, author of Silk and Steel: Women at Arms

“McCrum’s portrait project is full of contradictions and complexity, of ironies and sublime beauty. . . .The pairing of these stories with McCrum’s photography makes this book absolutely seductive.”–Publishers Weekly

“I opened this sizeable hardcover to one of the 80 photographic plates, and started going through the glossy pages, at first only noticing the striking beauty of the full-page photographs and the women who were the subjects. I found myself wondering if they were just models holding guns as props, until I began to read the personal statements on each adjacent page. Written in the women’s own words, it seemed to me that their stories read like something from the pages of Field & Stream, and I wanted to know more.”–Field & Stream

“Chicks with Guns, a gorgeous new book by Lindsay McCrum, is a lot more cerebral than it sounds. Fine art photographer McCrum shot doens of portraits of women with their firearms, accompanied by personal statements from each woman.” —Houston Chronicle

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Popularity: 4% [?]

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2
Daniel Radcliffe (Actor), Rupert Grint (Actor), David Yates (Director) | Format: DVD
(80)
Release Date: November 11, 2011

Buy new: $28.98 $17.99

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Product Description
The Deathly Hallows: Part 2 is the film all Harry Potter fans have waited 10 years to see, and the good news is that it’s worth the hype–visually stunning, action packed, faithful to the book, and mature not just in its themes and emotion but in the acting by its cast, some of whom had spent half their lives making Harry Potter movies. Part 2 cuts right to the chase: Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) has stolen the Elder Wand, one of the three objects required to give someone power over death (a.k.a. the Deathly Hallows), with the intent to hunt and kill Harry. Meanwhile, Harry’s quest to destroy the rest of the Horcruxes (each containing a bit of Voldemort’s soul) leads him first to a thrilling (and hilarious–love that Polyjuice Potion!) trip to Gringotts Bank, then back to Hogwarts, where a spectacular battle pitting the young students and professors (a showcase of the British thesps who have stolen every scene of the series: Maggie Smith’s McGonagall, Jim Broadbent’s Slughorn, David Thewlis’s Lupin) against a dark army of Dementors, ogres, and Bellatrix Lestrange (Helena Bonham Carter, with far less crazy eyes to make this round). As predicted all throughout the saga, Harry also has his final showdown with Voldemort–neither can live while the other survives–though the physics of that predicament might need a set of crib notes to explain. But while each installment has become progressively grimmer, this finale is the most balanced between light and dark (the dark is quite dark–several familiar characters die, with one significant death particularly grisly); the humor is sprinkled in at the most welcome times, thanks to the deft adaptation by Steve Kloves (who scribed all but one of the films from J.K. Rowling’s books) and direction by four-time Potter director David Yates. The climactic kiss between Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson), capping off a decade of romantic tension, is perfectly tuned to their idiosyncratic relationship, and Daniel Radcliffe has, over the last decade, certainly proven he was the right kid for the job all along. As Prof. Snape, the most perfect of casting choices in the best-cast franchise of all time, Alan Rickman breaks your heart. Only the epilogue (and the lack of chemistry between Harry and love Ginny Weasley, barely present here) stand a little shaky, but no matter: the most lucrative franchise in movie history to date has just reached its conclusion, and it’s done so without losing its soul. –Ellen A. Kim

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Popularity: 6% [?]

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Bridesmaids
Kristen Wiig (Actor), Maya Rudolph (Actor), Paul Feig (Director) | Format: DVD
(150)
Release Date: September 20, 2011

Buy new: $29.98 $15.99
47 used & new from $12.50

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Product Description
THIRTY-SOMETHING ANNIE HAS HIT A ROUGH PATCH BUT FINDS HER LIFE TURNED COMPLETELY UPSIDE DOWN WHEN SHE TAKES ON THE MAID OF HONOR ROLE IN HER BEST FRIEND LILLIAN’S WEDDING. IN WAY OVER HER HEAD BUT DETERMINED TO SUCCEED, ANNIE LEADS A HILARIOUS HODGEPOD GE OF BRIDESMAIDS A WILD RIDE DOWN THE ROAD TO THE BIG EVENT.

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Popularity: 2% [?]

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Star Wars: The Complete Saga (Episodes I-VI) [Blu-ray]
Mark Hamill (Actor), Hayden Christensen (Actor), George Lucas (Director) | Format: Blu-ray
(1593)
Release Date: September 16, 2011

Buy new: $139.99 $79.99
52 used & new from $73.61

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Product Description
Star Wars: The Complete Blu-ray Saga will feature all six live-action Star Wars feature films utilizing the highest possible picture and audio presentation.

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
(32 Years Before Episode IV) Stranded on the desert planet Tatooine after rescuing young Queen Amidala from the impending invasion of Naboo, Jedi apprentice Obi-Wan Kenobi and his Jedi Master discover nine-year-old Anakin Skywalker, a young slave unusually strong in the Force. Anakin wins a thrilling Podrace and with it his freedom as he leaves his home to be trained as a Jedi. The heroes return to Naboo where Anakin and the Queen face massive invasion forces while the two Jedi contend with a deadly foe named Darth Maul. Only then do they realize the invasion is merely the first step in a sinister scheme by the re-emergent forces of darkness known as the Sith.

Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones
(22 Years Before Episode IV) Ten years after the events of the Battle of Naboo, not only has the galaxy undergone significant change, but so have Obi-Wan Kenobi, Padmé Amidala, and Anakin Skywalker as they are thrown together again for the first time since the Trade Federation invasion of Naboo. Anakin has grown into the accomplished Jedi apprentice of Obi-Wan, who himself has transitioned from student to teacher. The two Jedi are assigned to protect Padmé whose life is threatened by a faction of political separatists. As relationships form and powerful forces collide, these heroes face choices that will impact not only their own fates, but the destiny of the Republic.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
(19 Years before Episode IV) Three years after the onset of the Clone Wars, the noble Jedi Knights have been leading a massive clone army into a galaxy-wide battle against the Separatists. When the sinister Sith unveil a thousand-year-old plot to rule the galaxy, the Republic crumbles and from its ashes rises the evil Galactic Empire. Jedi hero Anakin Skywalker is seduced by the dark side of the Force to become the Emperor’s new apprentice–Darth Vader. The Jedi are decimated, as Obi-Wan Kenobi and Jedi Master Yoda are forced into hiding. The only hope for the galaxy are Anakin’s own offspring.

Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Nineteen years after the formation of the Empire, Luke Skywalker is thrust into the struggle of the Rebel Alliance when he meets Obi-Wan Kenobi, who has lived for years in seclusion on the desert planet of Tatooine. Obi-Wan begins Luke’s Jedi training as Luke joins him on a daring mission to rescue the beautiful Rebel leader Princess Leia from the clutches of the evil Empire.

Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
Luke Skywalker and his friends have set up a new base on the ice planet of Hoth, but it is not long before their secret location is discovered by the evil Empire. After narrowly escaping, Luke splits off from his friends to seek out a Jedi Master called Yoda. Meanwhile, Han Solo, Chewbacca, Princess Leia, and C-3PO seek sanctuary at a city in the Clouds run by Lando Calrissian, an old friend of Han’s. But little do they realize that Darth Vader already awaits them.

Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi
(4 years after Episode IV) In the epic conclusion of the saga, the Empire prepares to crush the Rebellion with a more powerful Death Star while the Rebel fleet mounts a massive attack on the space station. Luke Skywalker confronts Darth Vader in a final climactic duel before the evil Emperor.

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Popularity: 2% [?]