This past week saw the release of WikidPad 2.1_01, a wiki-style text editor that can be used to capture thoughts and ideas -- stored locally or exported as an HTML file to upload to the web. If you need to store reminders of things you need to do and appointments you need to attend, PNotes 9.0.107 is a great sticky note tool that may be able to help you out. There’s also PNotes Portable 9 for anyone who likes the idea of running the same program from a USB drive. If pictures are more important to you than words, Juicebox 1.0.2 can be used to create a stunning gallery to show off your digital photos -- all in HTML5 glory.

The week was than usual on the browser update front, but there there were still important advancements for Chrome and Pale Moon. Google Chrome 20.0.1132.17 Beta hit the download servers as the browser’s march up the version numbering system continues, but there is little to report aside from a range of bug fixes -- if you want to keep your browser on a USB drive, look no further than Google Chrome Portable 20.0.1132.11 Beta. If you want an even more up to date version of Google’s browser, the Dev channel is for you and Google Chrome 21.0.1145.0 Dev and Google Chrome Portable 21.0.1145.0 Dev are the latest releases in this area.

The Firefox 12-based browser Pale Moon has also seen an important update this week which brings in smoother scrolling, better memory handling and improved stability. Various versions of the browser are available -- Pale Moon 12.1, Pale Moon x64 12.1, Pale Moon 12.1 Portable and Pale Moon x64 12.1 Portable.

O&O is a company that produces a large number of handy utilities and if you have a few of them installed, O&O LaunchPad 3.0.107 is a great way to access them all. The famous system cleanup tools CCleaner has received a couple of updates, CCleaner 3.19 and CCleaner Portable 3.19, which eliminates User Account Control warnings and adds support for new applications. While you’re looking at cleaning up and optimizing your computer, take a look at Defraggler 2.10413 and Defraggler Portable 2.10, both of which offer speed improvements of up to 30 percent on previous versions.

To help you to keep an eye on your hardware, Acronis Drive Monitor 1.0.0.566 can be used to check the health of your hard drives, and ESET Rogue Applications Remover 1.0.1.1b (32-bit) and ESET Rogue Applications Remover 1.0.1.1b (64-bit) are valuable tools for looking after your system and protecting it from malicious software.

If you have a keen interested in privacy and security, Free Hide IP 3.7.9.8 is a simple way to help stay anonymous online by masking your real IP address. Privacy concerns also exist offline, and Encryption Wizard 3.3.3 is an easy to use yet powerful utility that enables you to encrypt files on OSX, Windows and Linux machines, while Eraser 6.0.10 can be used to ensure that the files you delete cannot be recovered.

To help you to manage the files you do want to keep, Total Commander 8.0 FINAL is an advanced alternative to Windows Explorer that can handle local and remote files and has been updated to include an improved image viewer. If you want to store your important files online, Wuala “Wollishofen” build 401 enables you to do so securely, with the latest version adding customizable filters for synchronization and backup as well as numerous other bug fixes and improvements.

The final updates for this week’s roundup are for anyone looking to run virtual copies of operating systems -- VirtualBox 4.1.16 includes a range of minor fixes, and VirtualBox Extension Pack 4.1.16 adds even more options to an already powerful virtualization tool.

Remember to keep one eye on Downloadcrew Giveaway, Serif PagePlus 11, previously sold for $99.99, which ends May 27.

That’s it for this week. We’ll be back in about seven days’ time with another roundup.

Photo Credit: corepics/Shutterstock

Now, finally, the tide of public opinion on Internet privacy begins to flow in the other direction. Consumers are becoming more hesitant to share their data and are less tolerant when those with access to their data violate trust. That presents a tremendous threat to some of the titans of our day -- and an equally monstrous opportunity for others. Apple, Google, are you listening?

Honestly, I’m amazed that the issue was ever able to germinate and flower, particularly here in the United States, a country that distinguishes itself on the right to privacy. And a country that spent much of the last century wringing its collective hands over the Orwellian nightmare that awaited us down the road of technological advancement.

Discount Cards and the Dystopian Vision

Then in the 1990s -- the decade after the one in which George Orwell set his oppressive dystopian vision -- grocery stores kicked off their discount card programs, which enticed consumers to surrender personal information in exchange for lower prices. Consumers by and large agreed.

Privacy became a bit more of a concern in the "oh-oh's" with the explosion of social networking. To be sure, there’s no shortage of tussles along the way between consumers and the likes of Facebook, for example. For the most part, though, consumers have continued to participate.

I’m not sure exactly when the perception started to turn, though I suspect it was sometime last year. Maybe it had something to do with persistent reports that reveal what Apple and Google know about us. Or maybe it was the outcry over the discovery of Carrier IQ’s tracking software on smartphones from US carriers.

But you don’t need a tidal chart to see that the waves now are crashing closer to shore. A survey released a few weeks ago by University of California-Berkeley professors found that 79 percent of Americans "definitely would not allow" their phones to share information with stores they visit but don’t buy anything. Another 17 percent said they would "probably not allow" it.

Smartphones Make Privacy Personal

Nielsen earlier this month released a study on smartphone attitudes and behaviors that suggests consumers are quite concerned about privacy. According to the report, 73 percent of smartphone owners worry about the issue of personal data collection. That’s up a bit from an already high 70 percent in 2011.

Even if we can’t determine exactly when the tide changed, it’s not difficult to pinpoint why.

In a word, smartphones.

Our loyalty cards are basically walled gardens of personal information. We know exactly what we are divulging. Even Facebook is a walled garden to an extent. Obviously, the walls encompass far more than what you buy at a single store. But we still exercise control over what’s published and shared about us.

There’s nothing penned in, though, about what our smartphones know about us. Our calls pass through them. So do our texts, IMs and emails. They know where we are and where we’ve been. And the more useful our smartphones become, the more we integrate them into our lives.

The more we integrate them into our lives, the more they know about us. And the more they know about us, the larger and more hostile the waves of anger become. Count on it.

This sentiment should be top of mind for every strategist and decision-maker in the smartphone ecosystem. For Apple and Google, yes. But also for hardware vendors, carriers, app developers -- even cloud services. If your goods or services have the ability to collect or store our data, then you should consider your sales and profits to be on the tsunami hazard map. So prepare.

Gain More by Collecting Less

One of the better suggestions I’ve heard for tackling this issue proactively comes from Ian Chen, a longtime colleague and friend now at Sensor Platforms in San Jose: establish an Office of Privacy. Hire a big-name lawyer to head it up, and have him or her report to the CEO.

Establishing an Office of Privacy is an opportunity for a company to distinguish itself as a sentry for consumer data. The company that succeeds in building that perception will have an inside track against its competition. It will be the provider that consumers trust at a time when trust in the smartphone ecosystem is eroding.

Here are a couple other things to consider:

• Develop a privacy policy that is more restrictive than the competition’s. Don’t share consumer data, for example.
• Even better, don’t allow your product to collect any personal information at all. Someone will notice, and spread the news. That will more than offset the sacrifice you’ll make to your data mining efforts.
• Develop a way to have apps tap a sandbox of personal data that’s housed on the smartphone itself rather than in the cloud -- and prove to consumers that app developers can’t gain access. This can be at the platform level, or on the hardware itself.

Whatever you choose to do, do something. Smartphones are becoming our companions, our confidants. And the closer they get, the more virulent our reaction will be when they violate our trust.

Photo Credit: Viorel Sima/Shutterstock

Mike Feibus is principal analyst at TechKnowledge Strategies, a Scottsdale, Ariz., market research firm focusing on client technologies. You can reach him at mike at techknowledge-group dot com.

Wikis are normally all about group collaboration, but it doesn’t have to be that way. WikidPad is a simple text editor that allows you to construct a custom personal wiki on your own PC, perfect for organizing thoughts, ideas, to-do lists, contacts and more.

How does it work? Suppose you need to buy a few birthday presents for someone. Just enter BirthdayPresents in the start page, and because that’s a mixed-case “wikiword” it’ll be automatically underlined; double-click it and a new page called “BirthdayPresents” will appear in the navigation pane. You can click this and enter new text there; you might add subpages below that one with, perhaps, possible present ideas; and if you type BirthdayPresents on some other page then it’ll automatically act as a link to your new page.

Repeat this process with a few other keywords and you’ll soon have a tree showing how your topics are organized. If you’ve named and organized the tree sensibly then this will be easy enough to browse, although if you still can’t find something then a powerful search tool (with regular expression support) may be able to help.

Of course you also get plenty of text styling options to ensure the pages look as you’d like.

And while this is a personal wiki tool, if you’d like to share your work with others then WikidPad does provide some useful HTML options: in just a click or two you can export and publish the wiki as one, or maybe several HTML files.

Unfortunately, figuring out how to make all this happen isn’t as easy as you might expect. The program does come with a detailed Help file (presented in a wiki itself, of course), but it’s more about explaining individual features in detail than walking beginners through their first steps, and so it might take you a while to figure out what’s going on.

Once you have mastered the basics, though, creating and maintaining a wiki with WikidPad is relatively easy. Just type in a wikiword (such as BirthdayPresents, above) which already has content and it’ll automatically turn blue to indicate a link, no other syntax required. And so you’ll be able to extend your wiki quickly and with the minimum of hassle.

Photo Credit: Anna Chagoika/Shutterstock

Cloudyn estimates that some cloud adopters are wasting on average 40 percent of their annual expense on AWS resources they don't use. The reasons why vary: resources are often over-allocated, instances are left running after they are no longer needed, or even failing to take advantage of Amazon's own cost-cutting offerings.

Forrester Research principal analyst James Staten argues long-standing beliefs in IT are what causes us to so dramatically overestimate our needs. "The first rule we learned about capacity planning was that it's more expensive to underestimate resource needs and be wrong than to overestimate, and we always seem to consume more resources eventually", he says.

With the cloud this overplanning isn't as beneficial, and effectively erases one of the platform's biggest advantages, cost savings, if you don't get rid of what you don't need. This seems to indicate most cloud users could be saving a lot more if IT administrators just took a few minutes to review their cloud strategies and usage, Staten suggests.

A common error among AWS users seems to be a general pattern of allocating large or extra large instances when a small or medium instance would do. This led to a 17 percent utilization among the 400,000 instances Cloudyn monitored. Worse yet, among the extra large instances that utilization dropped to four percent, which are eight times as expensive as the small instances.

Cloudyn also found that many instances are left running and unused for days or even months at a time, even worse than underutilization because they aren't being used at all.

One way to fight ballooning cloud costs on AWS for computing power you might not immediately need is the Reserved Instance program. This allows the user to purchase a block of instances ahead of time and at a reduced cost to save money. Cloudyn says that most of the deployments in its study were not taking advantage of this program.

"This one takes longer to assess, but once you know you will be staying in the cloud for a year or more, there's no excuse not to take advantage of this", Staten argues.

To further this point Staten brings up the deceptively low cost of the instances themselves. While a medium instance will cost you 32 cents per hour, over the course of a year that is $2,800. If an IT department is not making full use of that instance, that is a significant amount of money -- especially considering there will be dozens more instances just as equally unused.

"It heavily behooves you to give back what you aren't using," Staten says. "Because you are paying for what you allocated whether you are really using it or not".

Photo Credit: Ovchynnikov Oleksii/Shutterstock

If you have been put off using DTP software in the past because you have found that it is either too complicated for day-to-day use, or too simplistic for quick projects, this could be the program you have been looking for and you can get a copy for yourself without having to part with any money. Serif PagePlus 11 originally sold for $99.99.

Using a wide range of features, templates and wizard, even potentially complex documents, such as trifold menus, can be put together in a flash. Many of the wizards that are available can be completed in a matter of moments, and you are guided through the entire process. You can keep things very simple and just change the text to reflect your personal requirements, or you can get a little more hands-on and customize the stock images and logos that are used.

A great feature of PagePlus 11 is its support for layers. Just like in an image-editing package, you can store different parts of your document on different layers, showing and hiding them as and when required. A really useful option sadly lacking from many desktop publishing programs is the ability to work with PDF. PagePlus 11 enables you to not only export the documents you create to the popular PDF format, but also to import existing PDF so they can be edited.

While there is a strong set of utilities that are geared towards the graphic side of document creation, the text-editing and layout controls are also very impressive. You’ll also find that there is excellent image support both in terms of the range of different formats that can be imported and the selection of editing tools that are included.

There are just so many features for you to explore in this versatile program that it is difficult to know quite where to begin. You can find out more about this amazing piece of software by paying a visit to the Serif PagePlus 11 review page.

To take advantage of this great giveaway, you’ll have to head over to the Downloadcrew Giveaway page between Friday May 25 and Sunday May 27.

Photo Credit: Adem Demir/Shutterstock

One way of evaluating products is to rate how well they meet the individual requirements, and express that rating as a numerical score. Tally the individual requirement scores to calculate a product score, which is a single number that expresses how close a product is to your requirements. Rank products based on these scores, and the highest scoring product is the one that best matches your specific requirements.

Finding Products

While you usually have a few potential products in mind when starting an evaluation, it is a good idea to find others that may be worth evaluating. Online competitive reviews are a very useful source of product information, and a great place to start. Try doing a Google search on the products you do know about along with words like “review” and “comparison”. This can lead to reviews that include unknown products. Also, look at any reader comments because they can often alert you to new products not mentioned in the reviews.

Asking industry peers is another excellent source of product information. Other useful sources are communities like LinkedIn groups, Spiceworks etc. Again, reader comments below articles in technical publications can provide valuable nuggets of information.

Rating Products

To rate a product you measure how well they meets each particular requirement in turn. Ratings are more than just a simple “yes or no”, and should have something like the fields listed below. Arrange these on the evaluation spreadsheet as columns under each product.

Requirement Rating: Your measure of how well a product meets a particular requirement. See Requirement Rating List below.

Rated by Optional: If there are several people rating products, you can record who rates each requirement. Typically implemented as a drop down list of names.

Rating method: A drop-down list that describes how the product was rated. For example, this could be based on the product’s webpage, you could have seen a demo, or it could be a hands on test of the product.

Requirement Score: The requirements importance has a value associated with it, as does the requirement rating. The requirement score is the product of these two numbers, and is a calculated field.

Rating Comment: This is a field where you can comment on how well the product met a particular rating. This is particularly useful when you are looking closely at the final product candidates.

The Requirement Rating is usually implemented as a drop down list with three columns:

Value: A numerical measure of how well the product meets a particular requirement.

Rating: A textual label attached to the rating value. In practice it is much easier to pick from the rating list than to pick a number.

Description: An explanation of what the rating value means to ensure everybody is on the same page.

As you work through rating different products, you always uncover new requirements. Make sure you add them to your evaluation. This is one way of ensuring you capture all your requirements.

Comparing Products

As you rate products against requirements, they generate requirement scores that are tallied up into product scores. This number is compared to a reference product that “fully meets” every requirement and the product score is expressed as a percentage of the reference product score. If you collected requirements into groups, you can weight those groups and factor this into the product score. Typically, all groups get a default weight of 1.0, and this is adjusted up or down as required.

Properly evaluating products is significant work, and it is useful to have an idea of your progress. You can see this by calculating the number of requirements rated as a percentage of the total requirements. Our experience has been that once you have evaluated over 50 percent of the requirements, the product score tends to be fairly close to the final score. However, for your short list products you should rate at least 90 percent of the requirements to ensure an accurate evaluation.

You can make product scores more useful with a “projected score” that is calculated by comparing the rated product to the reference product using only rated requirements. This estimates the product’s final score, and the accuracy improves as you rate more requirements. The projected score lets you compare products without rating them against every single requirement.

You can think of the product score as its GPA, and it gives you an excellent idea of how close the product is to your specific requirements.  As a rough guide you can exclude products that score less than 50 percent as being unsuitable, while products that have an 80 percent  to  90 percent score are usually very good candidates.

Occasionally you might find some products that score more than 100 percent; typically these products cost more than you want to pay.

Bear in mind that the primary purpose of product evaluation is to find the product that best matches your specific requirements as fast and easily as possible. While you are unlikely to find the perfect product at the price you want to pay, with this process you can find the best product for the price you do want to pay.

Final Thoughts on Reducing Purchase Risks

Typically, the first version of an evaluation is based on product information from the web. You can improve your evaluation quality by selecting important and higher requirements (see Requirements Importance table in first article), and testing the product against those requirements to verify your initial ratings. Sometimes there are surprising changes. You can manage this with the “Rating Method” column.

Using a structured approach to selecting products speeds up the entire process, and reduces purchasing risks. While speed is always important to your business units, watch out for impossible deadlines. These can force you to take short cuts evaluating products that can later prove disastrous.

Any significant purchase needs several reference customers. If the vendor’s reference customers will not say anything bad about the vendor, that is a warning sign! If vendor is not well known, it may well pay you to visit them in person. Are they what you expect? Even if you do visit them, make sure they are what they appear to be. For example, it is all too easy to get a tour of a data center and come away impressed, when all the vendor has is a small cage inside the data center. Ask to visit their business offices as well. If they resist the effort that is another warning sign.

Conclusion

In these two articles, we have described a structured way to create and manage a comprehensive purchase requirements list, and how to evaluate products against these requirements. The result is a list of product candidates ranked by how well they meet your requirements.

The primary purpose of product evaluations is to find the one that best matches your specific requirements. While you are unlikely to find the perfect product, you will cut through aggressive marketing and sales pitches to find the product that works best for your specific requirements. You will do this much faster than with unstructured methods, and you will be a lot more certain that your final choice was the best. By using a structured approach to evaluate products systematically, you also calibrate your own expectations. When you make the actual purchase you know exactly what you are getting, and there is no buyer’s remorse.

Photo Credit: Dusit/Shutterstock

Chris Doig has personally seen the problems caused by poor technology purchasing in multiple companies. He co-founded Wayferry, a startup that created a free decision support tool for technology purchasing. Wayferry’s mission is to help IT people everywhere make better technology purchasing decisions.

Because of the issues that Lithium batteries have with short circuiting, overheating, and exploding, special regulations have been placed on their transport for the last five years.

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration, for example, is especially careful about loose Lithium batteries, and only allows them to be kept in carry-on luggage. The U.K.'s Civil Aviation Authority likewise does not allow them to be checked, and batteries over 100Wh in capacity have to receive approval from the airline. Australia's Civil Aviation Organization classifies all Lithium batteries as dangerous goods, and the Australia Post has banned them from air shipment as well.

However, the Universal Postal Union, a specialized agency of the United Nations that coordinates the postal policies of the 192 UN member nations, recently said it will begin to allow international air transport of Lithium-based batteries. The UPU and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) have drafted technical instructions that will allow the air transport of devices with lithium-based batteries installed only after January first 2013.

The US Postal Service will keep its ban in place until these international rules are published.

"Until such time that a less restrictive policy can be implemented consistent with international standards, and in accordance with UPU Convention, lithium batteries are not permitted in international mail. The UPU Convention and regulations are consistent with the ICAO Technical Instructions for the Safe Transport of Dangerous Goods by Air (Technical Instructions). The Technical Instructions con­cerning the Transport of Dangerous Goods by Post do not permit in international mail “dangerous goods” as defined by the ICAO Technical Instructions. Currently, the only exceptions to this general prohibition relate to certain med­ical materials, infectious substances, and radioactive materials that are treated in accordance with additional requirements listed in the Technical Instructions. Lithium metal or lithium alloy batteries and lithium-ion cells are listed in the Technical Instructions as Class 9 Miscellaneous Dangerous Goods. The prohibition on mailing lithium batteries and cells internationally also applies to mail sent by commercial air transportation to and from an APO, FPO, or DPO location."

Photo: Concept W/Shutterstock

The program’s simple GUI allows you to enter up to five URLs, for instance, which can then all be saved in the same operation. (You need to enter the protocol, though -- http://my.domain.com, not just my.domain.com -- for this to work properly.) And it can also import URLs from text or CSV files, which may be handy if you often need to capture the same groups of sites.

Click Options and you’ll find there’s a good choice of output formats: you’re able to save your specified pages to JPG, PNG, BMP, TIF and even PDF files.

Conveniently, Web Page Saver creates an HTML report which makes it easy to review everything you’ve done. Your specified URLs are on the left-hand pane, and clicking any of these will display the site image or PDF file on the right.

And this report can even be customised with your choice of logo and report title, which could be handy for business use. If you point Web Page Saver at a few of your company’s competitors, say, then you could give the report a sensible title, your company logo, and it’s immediately ready to zip up and share with your colleagues.

It’s not all good news. The interface has some usability irritations -- you enter the URLs in a separate dialog to the main interface, for instance, then can’t see what those addresses are unless you go back to it – and looks horribly basic.

Web Page Saver does work well, though, and if you sometimes need to capture and review images of multiple web pages then the program could be very useful.

That accident, involving nuclear fuel rods, is virtually inevitable, most likely preventable, and the fact that it won’t be prevented comes down solely to Japanese government and Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) incompetence and stupidity. Japanese citizens will probably die unnecessarily because the way things are done at the top in Japan is completely screwed up.

Understand that I have some cred in this space having worked three decades ago as an investigator for the Presidential Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island and later wrote a book about that accident. I also ran for 20 years a technology consulting business in Japan.

Too Much Cleanup, Not Enough Time

Here’s the problem: In the damaged Unit 4 at Fukushima Daiichi there are right now 1,535 fuel rods that have yet to be removed from the doomed reactor. The best case estimate of how long it will take to remove those rods is three years. Next to the Unit 4 reactor and in other places on the same site there are more than 9,000 spent fuel rods stored mainly in pools of water but in some spots exposed to the air and cooled by water jets.  The total volume of unstable nuclear fuel on the site exceeds 11,000 rods. Again, the best estimate of how long it will take to remove all this fuel and spent fuel is 10 years -- but it may well take longer.

Fukushima has always been a seismically active area. Called the Japan Trench Subduction Zone, it has experienced nine seismic events of magnitude 7 or greater since 1973. There was a 5.8 earthquake in 1993; a 7.1 in 2003; a 7.2 earthquake in 2005; and a 6.2 earthquake offshore of the Fukushima facility just last year, all of which caused shutdowns or damage to nuclear plants. Even small earthquakes can damage nuclear plants: a 6.8 quake on Japan’s west coast in 2007 cost TEPCO $5.62 billion.

But last year’s 9.0 earthquake and tsunami made things far worse, further destabilizing the local geology. According to recently revised estimates by the Japanese government, the probability of an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude or greater in the region during the next three years is now 90 percent. The Unit 4 reactor building that was substantially damaged by the tsunami and subsequent explosions will not survive a 7.0+ earthquake.

An earthquake of 7.0 or greater is likely to disrupt cooling water flow and further damage fuel storage pools possibly making them leak. If this happens the fuel rods will be exposed, will get hotter and eventually melt, puddling in the reactor basement and beneath the former storage ponds. This is a nuclear meltdown, which will lead to catastrophic (though non-nuclear) explosions and the release of radioactive gases, especially Cesium 137.

The amount of Cesium 137 in the fuel rods at Fukushima Daiichi is the equivalent of 85 Chernobyls.

To review, there is a 90 percent chance of a large earthquake in the minimum three years required to remove just the most unstable part of the fuel load at Fukushima Daiichi. The probability of a large earthquake in the 10+ years required to completely defuel the plant is virtually 100 percent. If a big earthquake happens before that fuel is gone there will be global environmental catastrophe with many deaths.

A Cultural Problem

Let me explain how something like this can happen. For 20 years I ran with a partner a consulting business in Japan serving some of that country’s largest companies.  Here is how our business worked:

1. A large Japanese company would announce a bold technical goal to be reached in a time frame measured in years, say 5-10. This could be building a supercomputer, going to the Moon, whatever.

2. Time passes and in quarterly meetings team leaders are asked how the project is going. They lie, saying all is well, while the truth is that little progress has been made.  Though money is spent, sometimes no work is done at all.

3. The project deadline eventually approaches and a junior team member is selected to take the heat, admitting in a meeting that there has been very little progress, taking responsibility and offering to resign. The goal will not be reached, the company will be embarrassed.

4. In a final attempt to avoid corporate embarrassment, the company reaches out to me: surely Bob knows some Silicon Valley garage startup that can build our supercomputer or take us to the Moon. Money is no object.

5. Sure enough, there often is such a startup and the day is saved.

Fix Now, or Pay Later

It’s my belief that this is exactly what’s going on right now at Fukushima Daiichi. The very logic of time and probability that scares the bejesus out of me is being completely ignored, replaced with magical thinking. Organizations are committing to fix the current disaster and avoid the next disaster when in fact they are probably incapable of doing either. Lies are being told because Japanese government and industry are more afraid of their vulnerabilities being exposed than they are concerned about citizens dying. Afraid of being embarrassed, they press forward doing the best that they can, praying that an earthquake doesn’t happen.

This is no way to approach a nuclear catastrophe. What’s even worse is this approach isn’t unique to Japan but is common in the global nuclear industry.

Time is critical. What’s clearly required in Fukushima is new project leadership and new technical skills. Some think the Japanese military should take over the job, but I believe that would be just another mistake. The same foot dragging takes place in the Japanese military that happens in Japanese industry.

Fukushima Daiichi requires a Manhattan Project approach.  The sole role of the Japanese government should be to pay for the job. A single project leader or czar should be selected not from the nuclear industry and that leader should probably not be Japanese. Contracts should be let to organizations from any country on equal merit so only the best people who can move the quickest with safety get the work. Then cut the crap and get it done in a third or half the time.

But that’s not how it will happen. In Japan it almost never is.

Reprinted with permission

Photo Credit: Franck Boston/Shutterstock

Robert X. Cringely has worked in and around the PC business for more than 30 years. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Forbes, Upside, Success, Worth, and many other magazines and newspapers. Most recently, Cringely was the host and writer of the Maryland Public Television documentary "The Tranformation Age: Surviving a Technology Revolution with Robert X. Cringely".

As before, it is possible to conduct searches by typing, using your voice or taking a photo with your camera and using Google Goggles. There have been improvements made to the speed of autocomplete suggestions  so you should find that results are available faster than ever and you can take advantage of a preview pane that slides in from the side to view individual page results. Switching between search results and pages takes nothing more than a swipe, and this gesture can also be used to switch search modes, such as moving between a standard search and an image search.

To make it easier to find relevant text, there is a magnifying glass icon that can be used to perform a search for text on a page, saving you having to read through endless passages to reach what you’re looking for. When you’re looking for images, there is a great new look to work with. You can switch to a full screen grid view of results that provides a great overview of what Google has found for you. This makes for a much clearer way of browsing through results, but also gives you a better view of individual images you choose to view.

Google Search was already an impressive tool, but the latest update transforms it into something sleek and stylish. If you are an iPad owner, there is far less to look forward to in terms of new features -- nothing more than the ability to save images to the camera roll -- but iPhone users should jump on this update as soon as they can as it is a major advancement.

You can find out more and download a free copy of the app by paying a visit to the Google Search 2.0 review page.

Defraggler 2.10 promises to improve defrag speeds by up to 30 per cent, and includes a revamped scheduler and various other optimizations.

CCleaner 3.19’s headline new feature is a new setting, accessible from the Advanced Options section of the program, to skip the User Account Control warning each time the program is launched in Vista or Windows 7. This obviously speeds up loading, but will also please advanced users who configure the application via scripts or to run at boot time.

Application support is extended to Firefox 13 Beta and BitDefender, while Thunderbird is now given its own separate cleaning section.

Improved cleaning and detection options cover Aurora, Google Chrome Saved Passwords, Scheduled Tasks, Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, VLC Media Player and Avast! Antivirus 6. The update is rounded off by a slew of unnamed minor bug fixes. A portable build of CCleaner is also available.

Defraggler 2.10, also available as a standaloneportable build, claims to improve defrag times by up to 30 per cent. The new build also optimizes its free space algorithms, improves the calculation of a drive’s fragmentation during the defrag process and introduces a re-architected scheduling manager, which includes a fix for keyboard support. The update is rounded off by unspecified minor UI tweaks.

CCleaner 3.19 and Defraggler 2.10, along with CCleaner 3.19 Portable and Defraggler 2.10 Portable, are all available as a free downloads for PCs running Windows XP or later. Paid-for versions with automatic updates and support are also available through the Piriform website.

 Photo Credit: studio online/Shutterstock

If you want a gander at one of iOS 6's new features, just ask developer Rogue Amoeba. Apple unceremoniously pulled Airfoil Speakers Touch, which has been in the iOS App Store since 2009. In the past, the company has refused apps or pulled others that compete with Apple repeat functionality iOS offers. The ban hints at streaming capabilities coming in the next version, while raising questions about appropriateness or fairness. Hence the question to you: Is Apple right to ban Airfoil Speakers Touch?

"Today, we’ve been informed that Apple has removed Airfoil Speakers Touch from the iOS App Store", CEO Paul Kafasis says. "We first heard from Apple about this decision two days ago, and we’ve been discussing the pending removal with them since then. However, we still do not yet have a clear answer on why Apple has chosen to remove Airfoil Speakers Touch. Needless to say, we’re quite disappointed with their decision, and we’re working hard to once again make the application available for you, our users." Apple had already approved the removed version.

Rogue Amoeba has been here before, struggling to get the app approved. In November 2009, Kafasis bluntly stated: "The App Store is broken". The developer had to remove functionality for App Store approval, but restored it later on. "Following our post detailing the ordeal we had getting Airfoil Speakers Touch 1.0.1 through the store, we were contacted by Apple", Kafasis explained three years ago. "They indicated that, due in part to our post, they were changing their internal policies and would allow the desired behavior and artwork to be displayed". What was the problem? "Showing the computer artwork and application icons from your sending computer".

The new ban robs Rogue Amoeba of revenue, for which it has few options to recover on iOS. "As far as we can tell, Airfoil Speakers Touch is in full compliance with Apple’s posted rules and developer agreements", Kafasis says. "We’ve already filed an appeal with Apple’s App Review Board, and we’re awaiting further information. Unfortunately, Apple has full control of application distribution on iOS, leaving us with no other recourse here".

An anonymous commenter, responding to Kafasis states surely what many people suspect:

I’m going to take a wild guess and say that Apple is going to include a similar streaming feature in iOS 6 and iTunes 11, so they pulled your app for being too similar to the future feature. Disappointing though for many reasons, but purely from a customer standpoint because not everyone will be able to upgrade to iOS 6 or iTunes 11, or want to.

The app already offers functionality close to Apple's Airplay, but supports streaming from more devices and third-party services. Version 3, which released about a month ago, added support for iPad. The other big change, which just might foreshadow iOS 6 and iTunes 11: Enhanced Audio Receiving, which according to Rogue Amoeba turns an iOS device into a "full-fledged mobile AirPlay receiver. That means you can stream audio from one iOS device to another, or even send from iTunes directly to iOS. Why spend hundreds on a costly third-party AirPlay device, when you can use the iOS device you already have?"

Or in the case of Apple, why let a developer offer this functionality when iOS 6 and iTunes 11 can do so?

Airfoil Speakers Touch user MVeeH reacts: "If Apple is going to pull apps which have been around for years when they make their own version, everyone is in trouble. I love this app and I’m glad I got my copy already. Apple, this is weak sauce!!"

Do you agree? Is Apple simply curating the platform to keep the user experience pure? Is the company sacrificing a developer to avoid competition? Perhaps you see something else. Please respond in comments.

Photo Credit: Pavel K/Shutterstock

Perhaps the question should be: Who doesn't? Google search is a powerful tool for finding content of any kind, including copyrighted material posted without permission. Today Google sets the record straight, by releasing the URLs copyright holders request removed from search: 1,246,713 over the last month. These came from more than 1,000 copyright holders directed at about 24,000 domains.

Apparently more details about other copyright areas will come later. For now, search is priority, with Google planning to update requests daily. The report available on Wednesday offers data through yesterday.

"We’re starting with search because we remove more results in response to copyright removal notices than for any other reason", Fred von Lohmann, Google senior copyright counsel, says. "So we’re providing information about who sends us copyright removal notices, how often, on behalf of which copyright owners and for which websites".

The number of requests are increasing, with as many as 250,000 requests per week, or more than the total for all 2009. Does that mean there is more pirated content, or just more effort to take it down?

Top organization: Microsoft, with 543,378 URL requests. Top reporting organization: Marketly LLC, with 461,851 URL requests. Oh? You haven't heard of the company, either? I expected the MPAA or RIAA near the top. NBC Universal is third. But Marketly? The only company of that name I easily Googled is located in Seattle and lists Microsoft as a customer.

Google's von Lohman claims:

Fighting online piracy is very important, and we don’t want our search results to direct people to materials that violate copyright laws. So we’ve always responded to copyright removal requests that meet the standards set out in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). At the same time, we want to be transparent about the process so that users and researchers alike understand what kinds of materials have been removed from our search results and why. To promote that transparency, we have long shared copies of copyright removal requests with Chilling Effects, a nonprofit organization that collects these notices from Internet users and companies. We also include a notice in our search results when items have been removed in response to copyright removal requests.

Publishers have complained for years that Google holds copyright in low regard, since the company profits from searches of all kinds and its "open philosophy" in some ways contradicts long-standing intellectual property ownership tenets.

Given the number of requests, surely some, perhaps many, aren't legitimate:

We try to catch erroneous or abusive removal requests. For example, we recently rejected two requests from an organization representing a major entertainment company, asking us to remove a search result that linked to a major newspaper’s review of a TV show. The requests mistakenly claimed copyright violations of the show, even though there was no infringing content. We’ve also seen baseless copyright removal requests being used for anticompetitive purposes, or to remove content unfavorable to a particular person or company from our search results.

The revamped disclosure policy is rather brilliant, if you ask me (and no one is). Google can show that it honors copyright holders' requests, while also exposing what and whom they are. Now people fighting real and would-be copyright cartels have a weapon, too. Transparency is a two-way street.

Photo Credit: Yuganov Konstantin/Shutterstock

Google announced on Thursday that Android developers can now use in-app Billing to sell monthly or annual subscriptions from inside of apps sold in Google Play. The feature brings Google Play up to speed with Apple's iTunes App Store, which rolled out this feature over one year ago.

With the new feature, developers set the price and billing interval and Google Play manages the purchase transactions for both the seller and the subscriber. Users can view their subscriptions in the "My Apps" screen in the Play Store app, the same place they view their updates, or they can view them in the app's product details page in the Play Store app. This is where users can cancel subscriptions if they choose.

App developers and analysts alike have determined that in-app billing and the "freemium" distribution model are far more profitable strategies for software monetization than upfront billing or ad-subsidization. Today, Ibrahim Elbouchikhi, a Product Manager on the Google Play team said 23 of the 24 top-grossing apps in Google Play use in-app billing, and the total revenue generated from in-app purchases now exceeds revenue from traditional app purchases.

Companies such as video gamemaker Glu Mobile have based their entire business around the freemium model, so Glu will become one of the first companies to unveil an application that uses the in-app subscription API with its title Frontline Commando.

The feature, however, does not have to be limited to a single app, or even to apps at all. Developers can share subscriptions across multiple apps so users can "subscribe to the developer" or they can apply it to multiple products in Google Play such as e-books/magazines, music, and movies for bundled services.

Like its counterpart, Google+ for Android offers bleeding-edge photos. Pretty much everything about Google+ bleeds the edge of the screen. The effect is immersive. You just want to scroll and scroll -- and you will since so much less content fills the screen now. But the Android version has better visual flow than its iOS counterpart. Stated differently: It's snappier, more alive. "We're building for a mobile future", Google senior veep Vic Gundotra says. That's apparent from just how different the app is from the web experience -- and how immersive.

Immersion is Everything

Immersion is critical in an app of this kind:

1. Engagement. Social networking is all about relationships, meaningfully making connections with others. Google+ distinguishes from Facebook in several key areas, with common interest being one of the most important. The Circle concept allows people to engage with others they might not know based on something important they share, while Facebook is more about extending relationships with people whom they know -- even if just casually. The app's immersive quality pulls you into Google+ and there engaging others. New capabilities, such as inline editing and integrated Hangouts, improve and extend engagement.

2. Discovery. Because Google+ is so much about interests shared in common, discovering them is crucial. Also, there's a Twitter-like quality to the Google+ newsfeed that makes finding things all the more important, and difficult. The immersive, bleed-to-edge UI and tabs like "What's Hot" improve discovery of people, interests, happenings and news -- as well as the "Nearby" tab and easy "check-in" option.

3. Time spent online. Immersive web services/apps hold peoples' attention. This time is crucial for a cloud provider like Google that deals with lots of transitory traffic, mainly from search. Catching and keeping people is:

• Good for the brand
• Connecting users to ancillary products or services
• Providing the eyeballs for selling and capitalizing ads or other promotional gimmicks

For time spent on mobile, there is dramatic change underway. In March, according to comScore, the average American Facebook user spent more time on the site from smartphone than personal computer -- 441.3 minutes to 339 minutes, respectively. What neither Facebook or Google has done well: Wrap meaningful ads around the content, and that's an area the search giant has much to prove because 1) It's core to revenue; and 2) The bleed-to-edge design doesn't make room for ads the way one with lots more white space would.

What's Google+ 2.6 Like?

I downloaded Google+ for Android v2.6 late morning EDT on Galaxy Nexus HSPA+ and Asus Transformer Pad 300, running Android 4.04 and 4.03, respectively. I can't attest for how the user experience might differ on devices running older operating systems.

My reaction is mixed compared to the iOS version, which in some ways I find superior. Responding to Gundotra, Eric Leslie writes: "I was excited when I saw the iPhone version, but this looks like a rough port. There isn't much polish. If you're looking at a post and start scrolling down, there is a weird gradient that moves over the top that looks odd until you reach the white where the comments are. I don't see any sexy animations like the iPhone has. Come on guys!"

Beyond the visuals and improved discovery, two features stand out: Inline editing and integrated Hangouts. The latter, for video chatting, was one of Ice Cream Sandwich's stand-out features when launched last year. But as the cloud computing giant improved the feature as part of Google+, Hangouts grew clumsy, since users had to initiate them outside the social network. No longer.

"To get started, tap 'Hangout' in the (new) navigation ribbon, add some friends and tap 'Start'", Gundotra explains. "We'll ring their phones (if you want), and if someone misses the hangout, they can ring you back with a single tap".

Inline editing is a "Doh?" feature that Google should have included from day one. Who wants to post while mobile if making a typing mistake he or she can't fix later on?

Search is improved, and I find it to be better than in the browser. Google+ for Android presents options for "Posts" and "People". However, my initial reaction, which might change with further use, is that Google+ for iPhone discovery is better.

In the bullet points in the section above, I noted the value of connecting additional services. Some Google+ users aren't satisfied with how far the service has come. In response to Gundotra, Phil Lott calls the new app a "huge improvement", but then requests: "Please unify Google Talk, Google+ Hangouts and Google Messenger. These services don't interoperate the way the should, although they have very much in common. I' don't understand why I can't text someone on Google Talk via Google+ Messenger etc."

The tablet experience is superior in some ways, lacking in others compared to new iPad. Clearly neither Google+ app is optimized for tablets. On new iPad, the user taps 2X, which expands the size to fill the screen with iPhone border around the app. On the Android tablet, Google+ fills the screen, offering the more visually-appealing edge-to-edge experience. However, text and photos are much sharper on new iPad, which is in part because of the higher resolution display.

Have you used either or both apps? I'm particularly interested in how you think they compare. Important: Please state what device and OS version you use.

Axis is centered around searching, bookmarking, and content syncing across multiple devices. While Yahoo says Axis is both a desktop and mobile browser, it is really just a mobile browser for the iPad and iPhone, and a plug-in for Safari/Chrome/IE/Firefox which amounts to a little more than a "next-gen Yahoo Toolbar."

With that being said, Yahoo in 2012 has moved toward adopting a "mobile first" strategy, and third-party browser share in the mobile realm is still up for grabs, so concentrating on its mobile application is a solid maneuver.

The mobile browser changes a few things about the standard browsing experience by shifting the locations of tools away from their usual habitats. For example, browser tabs are now located in the lower left hand corner of the screen, where nearly every other browser puts them as a button in the upper right. Like other browsers, the top bar includes the URL/search field, back and forward arrows, a "share" button, a bookmark button, and the bookmarks tab. By touching the bottom of this bar and pulling down, the user can expand the search field to perform thumbnail searches or check out trending search topics and scroll through a series of suggested links.

It's worth noting that the "share" button lets users by default send links to their Yahoo email or Pinterest. There's no messing about with Twitter and Facebook straight out of the gate with this browser. Yahoo Axis is clearly the first browser to have chosen default integration with Pinterest, the one-and-a-half billion dollar social network.

When users are logged into their Yahoo ID, they are presented with a customized start page similar to Chrome's which can be loaded with favorite sites, articles to "read later," and links that are open on other devices. The idea is to tie search into the browsing experience across all devices, sort of like Google has done with Android and Chrome, but Yahoo has applied it to iOS and ostensibly all of the popular desktop browsers including Chrome.

"Starting today, search and browsing will never be the same and we’re excited to offer you a better way. Think of this as a sneak peek of what’s to come; we’re planning for Yahoo! Axis in more markets, on mobile devices, and with more killer features in the coming future," the Yahoo Search Team blog said on Thursday.

Download Yahoo Axis at axis.yahoo.com

The company also debuted new pricing structures that enable larger companies to adopt its services with more predictable pricing. This is a move away from the traditional per-seat model of the past, and makes cloud storage more cost-effective for large enterprises.

Box counts 11 million users including 120,000 businesses -- 82 percent of the Fortune 500. Box's most recent changes are in direct response to requests by users, and take into account the more widespread use of the cloud in the enterprise versus the isolated deployments of the past.

The changes to search within Box are evidence of this. Searching was previously limited to individual accounts. With the new admin console, administrators now have the capability to search across the entire enterprise, making it much easier to view files and folders and understand how they are being shared both within and outside an organization.

"Enterprises are realizing transformative gains by adopting the cloud, but there is a need for technology that provides deeper visibility, control and data security", Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie says.

Box has improved mobile security, enabling passcode locks for file access on mobile devices and more control over offline file access, and the ability to support more than one domain in a Box enterprise deployment. It is also introducing new logging capabilities to track items comments, tasks and sharing files.

The company says this will be especially useful in industries such as finance and healthcare, where such data must be kept to ensure regulatory compliance.

On the subject of pricing, Box's new Enterprise License Agreement will make large-scale cloud users happy. Instead of a per-seat cost, larger users will be able to enter into multi-year licenses with Box at a fixed rate. This will allow them to plan better for IT costs and will simplify the administration of large contracts.

Photo Credit: Tom Wang/Shutterstock

The big news in this release is the availability of a native 64-bit version of the program, which has a very real impact on functionality. Total Commander has been able to compare files by their content for a very long time, for instance, but version 8.0 x64 is the first release to support this for files greater than 2GB in size.

There’s a temporary disadvantage to the 64-bit option, though: Total Commander has built up lots of useful 32-bit plugins over the years, and these won’t work with the x64 build until they’re converted. If you make major use of plugins then Ghisler Software recommends you continue to use the 32-bit version, just for the moment (although they also point out that you can install both in parallel, even to the same directory, if you’d just like to try out the 64-bit release).

The changes elsewhere in this release are generally small, though still welcome. There’s faster file deletion, for instance; the multi-rename tool has some useful new options; the Lister can automatically rotate JPG images to the angle stored in their metadata, and of course there are plenty of bug fixes. If you’re interested in the full list then the latest History file will tell you more.

Total Commander 8.0 probably won’t win over many new converts, then, but if you’re already a fan and already using 64-bit Windows then it’s going to be an essential upgrade. Downloads are available now.

Photo Credit: S.john/Shutterstock

Oregon developer Panic has released a brand new version of its Mac web-coding tool, Coda 2, plus launched a streamlined iPad version, appropriately titled Diet Coda. Diet Coda is designed as a companion tool to Coda for use on the move.

Coda 2 launches with over 100 new features -- many of which are based on user requests, adds 64-bit compatibility and provides a completely refreshed user interface. It’s billed as a one-stop shop for web developers, incorporating editor, terminal, CSS and files management within a single application.

Coda 2 brings a revamped editor, introducing code folding, autocomplete support for variables and functions, improved workflow including automatic indentation and smarter closing tags, plus a streamlined find and replace tool.

The user interface introduces new smart, scrolling tabs that can be large or small, images or text. A Super Sidebar allows users to place all their most frequently accessed tools on a customizable dock, while users can now go full-screen with Code Focus, which hides the sidebar and allows them to concentrate fully on looking at the code.

File support is improved with the ability to manage source code with Git as well as SVN. Coda 2 also introduces a full file browser that supports FTP, SFTP, WebDAV and S3, and boasts a “Transit Twin-Turbo Engine”, designed to speed up file uploads.

Coda’s clips function has also been improved, with support for multiple placeholders, allowing coders to mark out areas where coding or other elements aren’t yet in place. Users can move between placeholders via the Tab key or customised key shortcut. Placeholders can now also be dynamic, with fill-in dates, selections and URLs among other elements supported.

Sites can now be grouped simply by dragging one on to another, while List View is designed for those who have many sites to work through. Support has also been added for iCloud Sync of sites and clips, but only if the software is purchased directly through the App Store.

A built-in Web Inspector tool is just one of the improvements to Coda’s CSS editor, while version 2 adds support for MySQL with a new built-in MySQL editor. The Code Navigator has also been revamped to make it easier to find blocks of code, with code hints appearing as the user types and simplified syntax colouring designed to aid navigation. Finally, the validation process has been improved.

It’s now possible to view iPhone and iPad Frames in the Preview app, while Coda 2 is also declared Retina-ready.

Diet Coda introduces a subset of features from Coda 2, allowing developers to edit their sites on the go if required. Diet Coda also links in with Coda 2, providing a live preview option on the iPad from that application.

Coda 2 is available as a 7-day trial download for Macs running OS X. The full version retails for $99.99, although for one day only all users can purchase it for the upgrade price of $49.99. Diet Coda is available for iPad only, and retails for $19.99, although again there’s a discount of 50 per cent for those who purchase the app today.

If you have used any of Symantec’s security software for Windows, taking a look at the antivirus tool that has been released for OS X is going to come as a little bit of a shock. Minimal is a word that best describes not only the app’s interface, but also its feature set. Rather than on-going background protection against viruses and other forms of malware, all that is on offer here is on-demand scanning -- although you do have the choice of performing a scan of your entire system, your Home folder or other locations.

In addition to this, you can drag and drop files you are unsure about onto the app window to perform a quick scan of just these files, but there are very few options to work with. This could be viewed as a good or a bad thing as it helps to keep the software simple to use, but it also means that important security features are lacking. Anyone that is more used to antivirus tools sitting quietly in the background taking care of business will need to change their ways of thinking if they install this app as the lack of background checking means that the onus is on the user to start any scans.

Should anything untoward be detected, potentially dangerous files are quarantined so they are unable to cause any damage. You have the option of attempting to repair the files, deleting it, or just restoring it to its original location. There is one intriguing feature to be found in iAntivirus -- the option of scanning your Facebook wall for malicious links that could be harmful to you and your online friends. This is a nice touch, but hardly a deal breaker.

You can find out more and download a free copy of the application by paying a visit to the iAntivirus review page.

Photo Credits: maraga/Shutterstock