Wolfram introduces the new .CDF container for interactive math documents
Wolfram Research, the innovative company behind the Wolfram|Alpha computational search engine, officially launched a new online document container called Computable Document Format (CDF) which is essentially your average PDF file that has been given the ability to do live computations and display the data accordingly.
The programming and computational functions in Wolfram's Mathematica software can be used to build, for example, a complex graph with a number of variables. It can then be saved as a CDF file so users can manipulate the variables and see the graph results live within the document. To view a CDF file, all it takes is the free CDF Player plugin.
Google+ to absorb social sharing startup Frid.ge
Fridge, a Y Combinator-funded startup that concentrated on small, private groups for social content sharing, has been acquired by Google with the intention of folding its team and product into Google+.
Fridge worked on a pretty simple concept: create intimate, private user groups to share photos, links, and status updates. Think Facebook, but limited to your "real friends." Users would create a group, invite other users by email, share their content about a particular event or subject in facebook-style feed, and close it up when the talking and sharing is done.
Anonymous and LulzSec fire back at FBI in war of words
Anonymous and LulzSec issued a joint statement Wednesday, firing back at FBI director Steve Chabinsky over his comments to NPR that Tuesday's arrests of 14 hackers associated with the groups was meant to send a message that "chaos on the Internet is unacceptable." The response strikes a markedly political tone.
Posted to Pastebin, the statement accuses governments of lying to their citizens and "dismantling their freedom piece by piece," governments conspiring with corporations and wasting taxpayer money, and lobbyists having too much control over day-to-day business "and corrupt them enough so the status quo will never change."
Mobile money is hot commodity but cooler than it should be
Global mobile payments will generate $86.1 billion in revenue this year, Gartner forecasts today. That's up 75.9 percent, from $48.9 billion, in 2010.
The big numbers are coming from a relatively small base -- 141.1 million users, up 38.2 percent from 102.1 million last year. That base isn't growing fast enough.
Get Safari 5.1 for Snow Leopard and Windows now
Apple has updated its Safari browser for Windows and Snow Leopard Mac users to version 5.1, bringing it in line with the versionbundled with the new Lion OS X release. Despite this, many features found in Lion won't be present in this build, such as sandboxing, full-screen browsing and multi-touch gestures.
The update does include a new process architecture designed to make Safari more responsive and stable. It also boasts a number of new features, including Resume (restore last browsing session when launching Safari), Reading List (add interesting webpages and links for reading later) and a new privacy pane, designed to make it easier to scrub cookies and other data left on your system by websites.
10% of all iOS sales last quarter were AT&T iPhones
United States wireless carrier AT&T published its second quarter results on Thursday morning, revealing consolidated revenues had grown to $31.5 billion, up more than $680 million, or 2.2% against last year; total wireless subscribers had reached 1.1 million with the addition of 331,000 new subscribers, and wireless data revenue had grown by a billion dollars, or a 23.4% increase against last year.
The company also revealed that it had activated 3.6 million iPhones in the quarter, with 24% of them being new subscribers.
Apple launches new offensive in war on Adobe
Adobe and Apple used to be partners, with the maker of Photoshop being one of the biggest third-party Mac developers. Then Apple started releasing digital products that competed with its partner, and CEO Steve Jobs came out against Adobe Flash.
Now the companies have quite the overlap in their customer bases and there's still a lot there, but Apple is doing its best to stop that.
Senate's antitrust head asks for rejection of AT&T, T-Mobile deal
AT&T's planned $39 billion merger with T-Mobile may have hit a major roadblock on Wednesday as the chair of a Senate subcommittee that handles antitrust affairs voiced his opposition. Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) said that the planned merger would lead to higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.
T-Mobile is the one remaining carrier offering lower priced rate plans, Kohl noted. In a letter to both the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission, the Wisconsin Democrat asked for the merger to be blocked because it "would likely cause substantial harm to competition and consumers, would be contrary to antitrust law and not in the public interest."
Google Labs shutting down, taking down brilliant experiments with it
In an obtusely titled blog post "More wood behind fewer arrows," Google Senior Vice President for Research and Systems Infrastructure Bill Coughran announced that Google Labs will be winding down its operations.
Google Labs was the breeding ground for many of Google's most brilliant search tools; some of which have "graduated" to become regular features in Google. This includes Google Maps, Reader, Video, Docs, Trends, and Similar Image search.
Google to alert users of possible malware infection
Google's engineers say they have noticed unusual patterns of activity on its search engine which has given it a way to detect a certain type of malware. As a result, the company has altered the code for its search engine to place a warning at the top of the search results that a computer has been infected.
The malware apparently sends a small amount of traffic through a proxy. The company believes that a few million PCs may be infected, and since launching the feature Tuesday has warned "hundreds of thousands" of its users to possible infection.
Process Explorer 15 adds GPU monitoring
Process Explorer has always been one of the best PC monitoring and troubleshooting tools around. There's always room for improvement, though, and the latest version sees a very useful addition in the ability to track graphics processor (GPU) usage on Windows Vista or later.
You won't see this by default when the program first launches, but that's easy to fix. Click View > Select Columns > GPU and check the boxes next to whatever you'd like to watch: GPU Usage, GPU Private Data, GPU Committed Bytes, or GPU Shared Bytes.
Grab online video to go with RealDownloader
Streaming videos need an active Internet connection to play and even then you can get stuck with buffering problems. Not all videos play on mobile devices either, but if you can download the video you can move it where you like. There are various browser extensions and playback programs that enable you to do this but RealNetworks' new release -- RealDownloader -- is by far the simplest and easiest to use.
Once installed the program adds browser extensions that detect whenever you navigate to a page that includes streaming video content. When you move the mouse pointer over a video, it provides a pop up button labelled "Download this video". Click this to store it offline. If you launch the program itself you'll see what downloads you have in progress and your completed downloads. Select one to play it back in RealDownloader's own video player.
Mac OS X Lion is here, and I don't like it
As announced late yesterday during Apple's fiscal 2011 third quarter earnings call. OS X 10.7 released today. It's yours for 30 bucks, if your Mac has Snow Leopard and Mac App Store installed. Otherwise, you're buying something more first, either OS X 10.6 or a new Mac.
Concurrent with Lion's release, Apple also updated MacBook Air with Intel Sandy bridge processors and Thunderbolt ports. Lion ships on all new Macs from today. Lion requires a Mac with OS X 10.6.8 to install and a Core 2 duo processor or later. If your Mac is Core duo, you're out of luck.
Windows 8: The death of malware? The death of anti-malware?
There is a lot of buzz about a recent set of tests by NSS Labs that show the Smartscreen reputation system in Internet Explorer 9 head and shoulders and most of the rest of the body above the competition in blocking malware on the web.
I think the results of the test are even more important than they seem, considering previous reports that Microsoft plans to make Smartscreen a base part of Windows 8. This would extend parts of the protection to any executable hitting the file system. This would be big news.
Apple debuts Sandy Bridge-powered Macbook Airs
Following its record-breaking third quarter earnings report yesterday, Apple on Wednesday took the wraps off of its latest generation of Macbook Air ultraportable notebook computers.
This round of Airs improves the processor speed of last year's generation by a fraction with new Intel Sandy Bridge chips, and replaces the mini DisplayPort jack with the new Thunderbolt I/O port, includes a backlit keyboard, and OS X Lion by default.
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