After entirely too much teasing, Google has at last taken the wraps from Android 4.4 KitKat. The new mobile OS is based on efficiency that brings smartphones to "the next billion people," according to Android Senior VP Sundar Pichai. Google's own apps use less memory, and the interface will ...
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/smqILH8KpFA/BOSTON (AP) — The Boston Red Sox didn't just build a World Series champion in 2013.
They also created a blueprint for the team's next title.
The Red Sox took advantage of last August's salary purge to add middle-market free agents like Mike Napoli, Jonny Gomes, Shane Victorino and Koji Uehara — all key contributors to the World Series championship. As he looks to this offseason, general manager Ben Cherington will need to replace some big parts of the '13 team — including center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury — without making the free agent mistakes of the past.
"To be in this position, given where we've come from, reflecting back a year ago at this time, there's been a lot that's happened in 13 months," manager John Farrell said after the game.
"Ben Cherington deserves all the credit in the world for what he has done for this roster. To come in and see the energy and the commitment that the (players) had, the buying into a team concept every single day, and the one thing that really stands out more than anything is just their overall will to win. And that was no more evident than in this entire postseason."
The Red Sox were still smarting from their 2011 collapse when they traded Josh Beckett, Carl Crawford, Adrian Gonzalez and more than $250 million in future salaries to the Los Angeles Dodgers last August. Although the team finished in last place, with the franchise's worst record in almost half a century, the rebuilding had already begun.
Instead of showering money on the biggest names to replace the high-priced talent that had departed, Cherington opted to take smaller risks on mid-range players.
It paid off with Uehara, the team's third or fourth choice as closer, winning the AL championship series MVP and closing out the last three wins in the World Series. It paid off with Victorino, who hit a game-winning grand slam in the ALCS and a three-run double in the Series clincher. And it paid off with Napoli, who had a three-run double in Game 1, and Gomes, whose three-run homer won Game 4.
"I'm a believer," Gomes said, adding that he knew the team had potential when he first reported to spring training. "As soon as we went to Fort Myers, (I knew) the movie's already been written, all we had to do was press play. And this is what happened."
But now it's time for the sequel.
Ellsbury is a free agent and agent Scott Boras is expected to demand a nine-figure contract. Napoli is also unsigned for next year, along with shortstop Stephen Drew and catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia. The team will almost certainly prevent pitcher Jon Lester from becoming a free agent by picking up his $13 million option.
Drew could be replaced at shortstop by prospect Xander Bogaerts, who played his way onto the postseason roster. David Ross wound up as the primary catcher by the end of the Series, but if Saltalamacchia leaves the Red Sox would be looking for a replacement. Jackie Bradley Jr. and Daniel Nava are available to join Gomes and Victorino in the outfield.
Other free agents include onetime closer Joel Hanrahan, who was acquired in a trade from Pittsburgh but missed most of the season recovering from Tommy John surgery. Left-handed reliever Matt Thornton and shortstop John McDonald, who weren't on the postseason roster, are also eligible to become free agents.
Farrell doesn't know how the team will replace those who leave.
But he is hoping the improved clubhouse atmosphere will help the team sign any free agents they target.
"I think maybe what's gone on around the game or what's happened here probably is taken note around the league," Farrell said before the 6-1 victory over the St. Louis Cardinals in Game 6.
"And I think, in the eyes of some, Boston might present some specific challenges that might be intimidating for certain players. But I would hope what they're witnessing would certainly become a place of destination for a number of guys that might have a choice."
Google's Reto Meier — a great dude to do walkthroughs if we've ever seen one — dives through some of the more techy changes in Android 4.4 KitKat. Still a great watch for the rest of us. Set aside a dozen minutes and check it out.
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/KQNGCvYaaL0/story01.htmUFC light heavyweight Antonio Rogerio Nogueira has been forced off the UFC’s return to London due to a lingering back injury. “Lil’ Nog” bows out of the March 8 bout with Alexander Gustafsson a mere five days after it was announced. MMAFighting first reported the news earlier this evening.
Minotouro has now pulled out of five fights due to injury since signing with the UFC in 2009. “Lil’ Nog” has gone 4-2 in the Octagon, last defeating Rashad Evans at UFC 156, but has never been able to advance much due to the 37-year-old’s health issues.
The UFC is set to return to London, England’s O2 Arena on March 8. Gustafsson is expected to headline the card, though it is unclear who he will face after Nogueira’s injury.
Front-Page Photo Credit: Gary A. Vasquez-USA TODAY Sports
Google's Ed Heyl has announced on the Android Building Google group that the source code for Android 4.4 in now available from Google. We'll have two branches — one for the open-source contribution and one for the Nexus 5 itself, per Heyl.
- kitkat-dev for kitkat open source contributions
- kitkat-release the kitkat release build (KRT16M) for the Nexus 5--which will be tagged with android-4.4_r1.
The code is available for download, as well as the factory images and proprietary binaries for the Nexus 5. You can find the images here, and grab the binaries if you're going to do a bit of code crunching yourself right here.
Prepare for the ROMs.
Source: Android Building
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/FiCRP2Y4f7o/story01.htmFILE - In this Saturday, Oct. 26, 2013 file photo, Pope Francis leaves after an audience with families in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican. The Vatican is taking the unusual step of conducting a worldwide survey on how parishes deal with sensitive issues such as birth control, divorce and gay marriage, seeking input ahead of a major meeting on the family that Pope Francis plans next year. The survey reflects the pope's pledges to move away from what he called a "Vatican-centric" approach toward one where local church leaders are more involved in decision-making. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino, File)
FILE - In this Saturday, Oct. 26, 2013 file photo, Pope Francis leaves after an audience with families in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican. The Vatican is taking the unusual step of conducting a worldwide survey on how parishes deal with sensitive issues such as birth control, divorce and gay marriage, seeking input ahead of a major meeting on the family that Pope Francis plans next year. The survey reflects the pope's pledges to move away from what he called a "Vatican-centric" approach toward one where local church leaders are more involved in decision-making. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — The Vatican is taking the unusual step of conducting a worldwide survey on how parishes deal with sensitive issues such as birth control, divorce and gay marriage, seeking input ahead of a major meeting on the family that Pope Francis plans next year.
The poll was sent in mid-October to every national conference of bishops with a request from the Vatican coordinator, Archbishop Lorenzo Baldisseri, to "share it immediately as widely as possible to deaneries and parishes so that input from local sources can be received."
The survey reflects the pope's pledges to move away from what he called a "Vatican-centric" approach toward one where local church leaders are more involved in decision-making.
Among the questions are whether gay marriage is recognized in their country and how priests minister to same-sex couples, including how churches can respond when gays seek a religious education or Holy Communion for their children. The poll also asks "how is God's mercy proclaimed" to separated, divorced and remarried couples. Additional information is sought on the pastoral care of men and women who live together outside of marriage. The survey also asks parishes whether they believe married men and women tend to follow church teaching barring the use of artificial contraception.
The National Catholic Reporter, an independent news organization, was first to report Thursday that the survey will be conducted, and it posted a copy online.
Helen Osman, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, confirmed plans for the poll to The Associated Press.
"It will be up to each bishop to determine what would be the most useful way of gathering information to provide to Rome," Osman wrote in an email. In England, bishops have posted the survey online to be filled out by a wide range of Catholics, including priests, lay people, parents and nuns.
The poll findings will help set the agenda for an extraordinary synod, or meeting, of the presidents of national bishops conferences in October 2014.
The introduction to the survey lays out a broad list of concerns which the document says "were unheard of until a few years ago," including single-parent families, polygamy, interfaith marriages and "forms of feminism hostile to the church." Surrogate motherhood is lamented in the document as "wombs for hire," and the survey cites as a new challenge "same-sex unions between persons who are, not infrequently, permitted to adopt children."
Francis has said the church needs to do a better job preparing young people for marriage, lamenting that newlyweds seem to think marriage isn't a lifelong commitment but just a "provisional" one. At the same time, he has said the church process for annulling marriages isn't working and must be reviewed.
Francis' emphasis on reforming the Vatican bureaucracy and boosting the participation of local church leaders and lay people has prompted speculation about how far-reaching his changes could be.
The pope has urged pastors to focus on being merciful and welcoming rather than emphasizing only such divisive issues as abortion, gay marriage and contraception. At the same time, he has made clear his support for traditional marriage and opposition to abortion.
The introduction to the new survey extensively quotes former popes and the Catholic catechism on marriage being the union of a man and a woman for the purposes of having children.
Baldisseri, secretary general of the Synod of Bishops, wrote in his letter that the meeting next year would be followed by another on the topic in 2015.
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Documents posted by The National Catholic Reporter: http://www.scribd.com/doc/180575701/Letter-from-Msgr-Ronny-Jenkins-to-the-USCCB
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2013-10-31-Vatican-Family%20Survey/id-71ce8670d43440e4abab4a1fd721faa8The affecting, well-conceived story explores collectively repressed Holocaust guilt.
Friday, November 1 (Menemsha Films)
Maciej Stuhr, Ireneusz Czop, Jerzy Radziwilowicz, Zuzana Fialova, Andrzej Mastalerz, Zbigniew Zamachowski, Danuta Szaflarska, Robert Rogalski, Maria Garbowska, Wojciech Zielinski
Wladyslaw Pasikowski
A Polish village is forced to acknowledge it has whitewashed Holocaust history in Aftermath, Wladyslaw Pasikowski's powerful but not bombastic fiction inspired by actual events. Reportedly using the story of a mass killing in Jedwabne (detailed in the Jan Gross book "Neighbors") as a jumping-off point, Pasikowski imagines a community whose Catholic population was far more complicit in Nazi crimes than they admitted to their children, leaving half-buried secrets for later generations to uncover. The film has stirred controversy in Poland since its first screenings at the Warsaw Film Festival a year ago; it will draw less attention here, for obvious reasons, but its novel approach and assured execution should elicit strong reviews in an arthouse release.
The story is told without a single flashback to WWII and with an all-Gentile cast of characters. The setting is many decades after the war (the number of elderly characters on hand who were adults at the time suggests we're not in 2013), and Franek Kalina (Ireneusz Czop) is returning home, reluctantly, after twenty years in the U.S. Something has happened with his brother Jozek (Maciej Stuhr), a personality shift extreme enough to cause his wife to leave him and inspire random acts of intimidating vandalism from neighbors.
STORY: 'Aftermath' Dares to Unearth Terrible Secrets of Poland's Lost Jews
It seems Jozek has been ripping up the surface of a nearby road -- something that makes no sense until we learn it was paved using the headstones of Jewish graves. Though the Kalinas aren't Jewish (Franek has anti-Semitic tendencies, in fact), Jozek couldn't stand the idea of the dead being disrespected in this way, and has been reconstructing a symbolic graveyard in one of his wheat fields. He started teaching himself Hebrew. Whether his young neighbors fully understood why or were motivated by a kind of unacknowledged genetic memory, they made him a pariah.
As the two brothers patch up family ties, Franek stumbles into a mystery that ensures he'll draw even more local ire than his brother has. The shocking details hew closely, though not exactly, to those of the Jedwabne case, but Aftermath's avoidance of Holocaust-film tropes lets the picture address weighty historical and moral issues while fitting into the genre shoes of a small-town thriller.
PHOTOS: 25 of Fall's Most Anticipated Movies
The action remains present-tense, with Stuhr and Czop offering thoroughly specific takes on their characters' battles with conscience and with local thugs; their roles shift surprisingly as more secrets come to light. Pasikowski's script rejects the temptation to shove the story's larger implications down our throats, keeping its focus on two brothers and a plot of land. Judging from the vehement condemnation the film has faced from Polish nationalists (it was banned in some cinemas), it hardly needed to spell things out more than it did.
Production Company: Apple Film Productions
Cast: Maciej Stuhr, Ireneusz Czop, Jerzy Radziwilowicz, Zuzana Fialova, Andrzej Mastalerz, Zbigniew Zamachowski, Danuta Szaflarska, Robert Rogalski, Maria Garbowska, Wojciech Zielinski
Director-Screenwriter: Wladyslaw Pasikowski
Producers: Dariusz Jablonski, Violetta Kaminska, Izabela Wojcik
Director of photography: Pawel Edelman
Production designer: Allan Starski
Music: Jan Duszynski
Costume designer: Malgorzata Braszka
Editor: Jaroslaw Kaminski
No rating, 107 minutes
