Move over GarageBand and make room for MAGIX Music Maker MX
Music creation software has something of a poor reputation, with many people regarding it as being expensive to buy and complicated to use. This is a reputation that MAGIX is trying to change with its Music Maker program, and the latest version, MAGIX Music Maker MX goes a long way to achieving this aim. While the program is incredibly simple to use, the music creation you produce using the software can be made as basic or as complex and involved as you like.
Used at its most basic, MAGIX Music Maker MX provides you with 64 audio tracks onto which you can arrange a series of samples to create the skeleton of a musical composition. If you want, you can leave things as they are, but even the least musically minded of people could not resist tinkering with special effects, dropping in a few loops here and there, and then there is the drum machine to play with. Before you know it, you have become fully engrossed in the process of putting together a piece of music -- and it does not matter that you’ve never picked up an instrument in your life.
Google says Gmail has been up 99.99% of the time in 2011
Google has set a pretty high bar for itself, guaranteeing 99.9% availability of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs, Google Groups and Google Sites to its Google Apps customers. If it cannot meet that level of availability, all of its customers are entitled to a certain amount of free days worth of service in each billing cycle.
In a somewhat self-aggrandizing blog about Google's cloud services today, Google Apps product manager John Collins reiterated that Gmail was up for 99.984% of 2010, and revealed that it's currently at over 99.99% uptime for the first half of 2011.
Partition Wizard 7 offers little new in free version
MiniTool Solution Ltd has released a brand new version of its non-destructive partitioning software. MiniTool Partition Wizard 7.0, available as a free-for-personal-use Home Edition, is also can be had in a number of paid-for editions, with prices starting from $30 for Partition Wizard 7.0 Professional.
The biggest update in Partition Wizard 7.0 is actually restricted to paid-for editions of the program, namely the added support for Simple, Spanned, Striped, Mirrored and RAID-5 volumes, with the addition of a brand new Dynamic Disk menu offering a host of new options for handling such volumes.
Sprint files antitrust lawsuit against AT&T, T-Mobile merger
On the last day of August, the U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit in the District of Columbia to block the proposed merger of national wireless network operators AT&T and T-Mobile. Tuesday, competing national carrier Sprint Nextel announced it had filed a similar antitrust suit in federal court, saying the $39 billion merger is, in short, illegal.
"Sprint opposes AT&T’s proposed takeover of T-Mobile,” a statement from Susan Z. Haller, vice president of litigation at Sprint, said today. “With today’s legal action, we are continuing that advocacy on behalf of consumers and competition, and expect to contribute our expertise and resources in proving that the proposed transaction is illegal.”
AOL will ruin TechCrunch
Joe Wilcox argues that TechCrunch produces boatloads of original content using a method called process journalism. In counterpoint, "TechCrunch just exposed what is wrong with tech journalism today", Ed Oswald contends that the blog is rife with conflict of interest and questionable news reporting ethics.
Have you been on the Internet long enough to remember Global Network Navigator -- yeah, that's GNN. It was the first web portal I used to get news and quick access to other useful sites. O'Reilly & Associates (now O'Reilly Media) launched the site in 1993. AOL bought GNN in 1995 and closed it in 1996, quite unceremoniously. The domain is still active and points to Huffington Post. Old-time Netters will remember GNN and a long list of other properties and products purchased by AOL that were later abandoned or closed -- all part of a decade-and-a-half plan to reinvent as a new media company.
No more waiting for annoying cell phone salesmen to configure your new gear while they try to sell you accessories
While the short-range wireless technology known generically as Near-field communications (NFC) is still in its early stages of consumer adoption, the technology is already in its seventh year of development and it is maturing beyond the point where it can be used simply for exchanging small bits of information or payment authorization. Imagine if companies could make a single production run of smartphones, tablets, or notebooks without having to regionalize the software on it, and that was done the moment the machine was purchased.
Switzerland-based semiconductor company STMicroelectronics on Tuesday launched a new dual-interface EEPROM memory unit (M24LR64) that is specifically designed to make a system's data available via NFC at all times. EEPROM is a non-volatile form of memory commonly used in microcontrollers in industrial machinery, and can often be found in digital sensors and timers.
DigiNotar scandal worsens: 500+ rogue certificates issued, five CAs breached
The hacker who breached the DigiNotar certificate authority has come out, or at least claimed to. He appears to be the same hacker who breached Comodo, another CA, several months ago. (Hat tip to F-Secure.) "COMODOHACKER" seems to have a problem with the Dutch government.
He claims to have gotten past numerous sophisticated protections in DigiNotar's systems, the details of which he will divulge later, and that he retains inside access to four other "high-profile" CAs and can still issue rogue certificates from them. He also claims that the password for the PRODUCTION\Administrator account (the domain administrator of certificate network) is "Pr0d@dm1n".
InstantShot: Better screen capture for your Mac
It’s a strange quirk of OS X that it boasts not one, but two separate screen-capture utilities. One is triggered simply by pressing [Cmd] + [3] or [4] depending on whether you want a full-screen shot or a portion of the screen. While configurable, you’ll need to fiddle about with the command line each time you want to change a setting.
Open the Applications > Utilities folder and you’ll find the other: Grab. It allows you to take timed grabs, place your choice of cursors on the screen and save the finished output with your choice of filename in your chosen location. Each tool has its own pros and cons, but what if you could combine the best of them into a single free utility for your Mac? The good news is you can, in the form of InstantShot! 2.5 for Tiger, Panther and SnowLeopard, or InstantShot! 2.6b for Lion.
Looking for work and got an offer by email? Criminals want you to be their money mule
I like reading my spam. Sounds strange? Perhaps it is, but from the perspective of an eCrime investigator, there's often something interesting inside a spam folder.
One day I was going through the spam folder of my inbox and came across an interesting job offer. A company was looking for people who could speak English, had an email box and a PC, could work unsupervised, and had no criminal record.
I shacked up with Chromebook
Earlier this week, writing for ZDNet, Scott Raymond proclaims: "Chromebooks are dead, they just don't know it yet". He makes a good argument, which I partly agree with regarding Android tablets. I'll get to that later. He also asks: "Why would I want to switch to a Chromebook when my MacBook Air runs OS X and Windows and is at least a pound lighter?" That's exactly what I did -- sold my MacBook Air and switched to Chromebook, which I used for the entire month of August; still today.
Chromebook is an interesting invention, because of the concept: The browser is the operating system -- well, Chrome running on top of Linux. The browser is the user interface. There is no desktop, although file system and local storage are accessible. Acer and Samsung each make two models, both running Chrome OS, one with WiFi-only and the other with 3G, too.
AT&T's T-Mobile buy could repeat mistakes of Verizon and Alltel merger
This week, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a civil antitrust lawsuit in the US District Court for the District of Columbia against national wireless carrier AT&T, who is attempting to acquire T-Mobile USA. The Department of Justice says the attempted acquisition is a violation of the Clayton Antitrust Act, shrinking the market for nationwide wireless coverage from four competitors to just three.
"Although smaller providers exist, they are significantly different from these four. For instance, none of the smaller carriers’ voice networks cover even one-third of the U.S. population, and the largest of these smaller carriers has less than one-third the number of wireless connections as T-Mobile," the lawsuit complains.
Calm down, Final Cut Studio is back -- but for how long?
In what is most certainly a move aimed to silence critics of Apple's move to Final Cut Pro X, Apple has quietly made available again the previous version, Final Cut Pro 7. It's going to take a little work in order to get it, though: you need to call 1-800-MY-APPLE to order.
Apple will not offer Final Cut Studio 3 -- which includes Final Cut Pro 7 as well as Motion 4, Soundtrack Pro 3, DVD Studio Pro 4, Color 1.5 and Compressor 3.5 -- in stores or online. There would be no discount for the old software either: it's still $999 for the package, or $899 for educational customers.
ABBYY FineReader now supports popular e-reader formats
Moscow-based optical character recognition specialist ABBYY has released a major new update of its renowned OCR application. ABBYY FineReader 11 Professional Edition, which allows users to convert images or scanned documents into editable text, boasts improved processing speeds of up to 45 per cent thanks to a new black and white processing mode.
Version 11 also adds an ebook creation tool and direct support for OpenOffice Writer, plus incorporates a tool to improve the bulk processing of documents while promising to improve the accuracy when scanning and formatting complex documents.
'I was on the Apple board until I couldn't stand it anymore'
Former Google CEO and now Chairman Eric Schmidt offered some insight into his time on Apple's board to attendees of Salesforce.com's Dreamforce 2011 conference on Thursday, saying that while he was proud of his time with the company differences eventually caused him to leave.
Schmidt would not specify the reasons why he left the Apple board in 2009, although many believed it had to do with Google's involvement in Android. That is likely not entirely the reason: the search company purchased the rights to Android in 2005, and Schmidt joined Apple the following year.
Google cuts security corners to gain market share
It has been obvious for some time that Google's app standards for Android are lenient to say the least. That's why Android is the favored platform for mobile malware. But it turns out that Chrome extensions are a huge, and similar problem that I'm beginning to really worry about.
When Android phones started coming out Google had a lot of catching up to do. Back then there was a lot of mindless talk about how many tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of apps a phone had. Obviously 200,000 apps is twice as good as 100,000, right? The way Google structured their app system for Android seems to me to be designed to maximize the number of apps by making it cheap and easy to create and distribute them. And this happens at the expense of security.
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