Find more with UltraFileSearch
If you’ve read a few PC speedup guides then you’ll know that Windows Search (or its indexing service, at least) often gets significant blame for tying up system resources and generally slowing you down. We’re not entirely sure how accurate this is -- the indexing service should only run when your PC is idle, minimising any disruption -- but if you’d like to try an alternative index-free search tool anyway then you might be interested in the portable UltraFileSearch Lite.
The program looks a little like the Windows XP search tool, and is similarly easy to use. There’s no need to remember a lengthy list of search filters: you’re able to search by name, size, and file creation/ modification/ last access dates in just a few clicks.
Google activates 900,000 Androids per day
Andy Rubin revealed the number late day, on the eve of Apple's developer conference. Google's Android chief disclosed the activations while dispelling rumors circulated by Robert Scoble about leaving for startup CloudCar. Rubin isn't going anywhere.
He last disclosed activations per day -- 850,000 -- on February 27. The new number means 27 million a month or 81 million every 90 days. That number is consistent with actual smartphone sales. Gartner, which tracks sales to end users rather than the analyst firm standard of shipments into the channel, reports 81.067 million Androids sold during first quarter -- again, that's smartphones and doesn't include tablets. By comparison, Apple sold 33.1 million iPhones, but the number doesn't include iPad or iPod touch.
You don't want to miss Process Explorer 15.2
Microsoft Sysinternals has released Process Explorer 15.2, the latest edition of its excellent Task Manager replacement. And while recent Sysinternals updates haven’t exactly been exciting, this is one you don’t want to miss: it contains some very useful additions.
The Process Timeline column, for instance, displays a bar which shows how long a particular process has been running in relation to everything else. And so you can tell at a glance what’s been running since Windows launched, and what’s only just started (very useful if, say, you think you’ve just been hit by malware and want to check new processes in particular).
The spotlight shines on these 27 software downloads
As we move through June, there are more and more software titles being released. The past week has been pretty busy, particularly on the web browser front, but there have also been a number of other programs worthy of note.
If you still use physical CDs and DVDs, ISO Workshop 3.0 is worth taking a look at as it enables you to work with virtual drives to save having to keep switching discs. Diskeeper 12 Home is a great tool for anyone looking to ensure that their hard drive is completely defragged, and Diskeeper 12 Pro includes support for drives exceeding 1TB. Another interesting tool for maintaining your system is GhostBuster 1.0.1.0, a free utility that remove references in the registry to hardware you no longer use. There’s also a portable version available – GhostBuster Portable 1.0.1.0.
Four stories you should read this Sunday, June 10
Three years ago, my Sunday mornings started with the New York Times. Now it's Feedly, which appealingly presents my RSS feeds synced from Google Reader. I mainly use the app on a tablet, and I highly recommend it. This morning, as Apple's developer conference approaches tomorrow, there are loads of punditry -- and much of it pointless.
Four posts caught my attention enough to write about them and all published over the weekend. Interestingly, the majority are guest posts rather than regular staff pieces.
Learn from the past to know the future: Video Game History Museum is now a legitimate idea [video]
Non-profit organization the Video Game History Museum is trying to preserve and share the record of video game development, culture and history. The museum is a concept that sprouted out of the 30-plus years of old video game consoles from collectors at the Classic Gaming Expo, which has grown in size for the last 13 years since 1999.
The attendees have come together to start the museum to show the passion, work, effort and failures of the video game industry, which has profoundly changed our culture since the first games of Asteroid (in computer labs of universities) or Pong (stand up arcade in bars) in the 1970s. One of its directors, Joe Santulli gives, us the run down of the hopes for a physical location inside the pop-up museum at E3 2012.
I'm boycotting Apple
Patent bullying and ongoing competition by litigation and intimidation are reasons why. For me the last straw came earlier this week when Apple sought to ban importation of Samsung Galaxy S III (the request for preliminary injunction is before a judge and a ruling could come as early as next week). The phone launched in 28 countries on May 29 and goes on sale from five US carriers within the next 30 days. Many tech reviewers and pundits have called Galaxy S III an iPhone 4S killer. Apple doesn't have a competitive product in market so instead seeks to block Samsung's -- all under the guise of protecting innovations.
Apple is an amazing marketer that manages perceptions very well. One of these regards innovation and the idea that other companies imitate Apple, often badly, and its trendy ideas must be protected. Perception is one thing. Reality is another. Apple isn't as innovative as its corporate "reality distortion field" would have everyone believe. But the company has gotten quite good at something: Unleashing a torrent of suits to secure patents and to defend them -- and many cover processes that should never have been awarded patents in the first place. Apple has gotten quite good at gaming the patent system. I want no part of it.
The 25 worst pins and passwords
At a time when password breaches like the one at LinkedIn are once more making the news, there's plenty of good advice around about how to select a strong password as opposed to the sort of stereotyped easy-to-remember-but-stupendously-easy-to-guess password that turns up again and again in dumped lists of hacked passwords.
So if your favorite, much-used password (or something very like it) is in the following list, it might be a good idea to stop reading this now, go to the link on how to select a strong password and use it as a basis for changing all your passwords to something safer (then come back and think about the PINs you use). The list is abstracted from one compiled by Mark Burnett, representing the most-used passwords in a data set of around 6 million:
If you go to see 'Prometheus' expecting an 'Alien' prequel you are gonna have a bad time [review]
The audience at the Thursday June 7 12:10 am screening of "Prometheus" at the Arclight Theater Hollywood on sunset Blvd in Los Angeles just sits in their seats. No one moves, no one talks. The lights come up and it is so quiet you can hear a pin drop. People just stare forward and after a minute turn to their friends with the look of what did I just watch?
Slowly people stand and shuffle out when the credits start to roll. I mean you can taste the confusion and the hurt of the crowd. The reaction is the same as the dejected looks I saw at age 15 when "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace" ended. Did the unimaginable just occur? Could Prometheus do to "Alien" what the prequels did to "Star Wars"?
Use a 'code book' to protect (and to recall) your online passwords
With the recent announcements of password breaches at LinkedIn, and warnings from Google about state-sponsored attacks on Gmail accounts, it seems like a good idea now to review some password security basics. Then there is report today that someone hacked presidential candidate Mitt Romney's Dropbox and Hotmail.
In this post, we’re going to take a look at a rather low-tech solution to a decidedly high-tech problem: How to guard against password reset attacks, and where to securely store the answers to your password reset questions.
3,000 websites turn on iPV6 and nothing happens -- that's the way it should be
Two days ago, 3,000 important websites, including Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Yahoo as well as many top Internet Service Providers, turned on their IPv6 support and this time they left it turned on. Nothing happened. Or maybe I should say nothing bad happened, which is good, very good.
The world is quickly running out of new IPv4 addresses, with almost 3.7 billion issued. There are two workarounds: 1) complicate the Net further with cascading arrays of Network Address Translation (NAT) servers that slow things down, inhibit native inbound connections like VoIP, and defeat location services both good and bad, or; 2) move to IPv6 with 128-bit addresses (IPv4 is 32-bit) that would allow giving an IPv6 address not only to every person and device but to every sock in everyone’s sock drawer as well, allowing bidirectional communication with hundreds of billions of devices from pacemakers to doorbells. Editor: Yes, but what about the socks that disappear in clothes dryers?
Microsoft gets 80,000 seat Office 365 contract with FAA, DOT
Microsoft's Office 365 cloud productivity suite gained even more momentum on Thursday, with both the Department of Transportation and Federal Aviation Administration announcing they will move some 80,000 employees to the platform.
The deal is worth some $91 million over seven years, and is provided through Microsoft partner Computer Sciences Corp. Office 365 plays a central role in the SaaS deal, which will offer DOT and FAA employees email, instant messaging, calendaring and webconferencing tools in a multi-platform environment.
Social CRM is about thinking and feeling as customers do
New York City buzzed earlier this week when Salesforce announced it will acquire Buddy Media for $689 million. For those that have watched Mike Lazerow build the company from "a social media agency", as people jabbed in the early days, to a true social management platform, this outcome doesn’t come as a surprise. Buddy quickly grew as brands’ presence on social media shifted from experimental marketing budgets to a critical part of any chief marketing officer’s strategy. While Buddy originally (and wisely) hitched its wagon to Facebook as the network took off, they have since diversified outside the walls of Mark Zuckerberg’s castle and into other networks and platforms like Twitter, Google+ and more.
While this purchase may or may not come as a surprise to people, I have seen many folks scratching their heads and asking: "Why Salesforce?" Why not go, instead, with WPP (who’s an investor), Facebook, or another big agency holding company. The answer to this question lies in the difference of business fundamentals between agencies, Facebook, and Salesforce.
Why do we need crowdfunds?
First in a series. When President Obama signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act on April 5th, the era of crowdfunding began as individual investors everywhere were promised an opportunity to gain access to venture investments previously limited to institutions, funds, and so-called qualified investors. Come January 1, 2013, we’re told, anyone can be a venture capitalist, but hardly any of these new VCs will know what they are doing. Spurred by the new law we will shortly see a surge of crowdfunding startups giving for the first time unqualified investors access to venture capital markets. And it will be a quagmire.
Like disk drive startups in the 1980s, each of these new crowdfunds will project 15-percent market share. Ninety-five percent of these funds will fail from over-crowding, under-funding, mismanagement, lack of deal flow, being too late, being too early, or just plain bad luck. A few will succeed and a couple will succeed magnificently, hopefully raising all boats. The point of this column and the two to follow is to better understand this phenomenon and how readers can benefit from it or at least avoid losing their shirts.
Get more from your mobile website with Keynote MITE
Building a website which looks good on desktop computers and mobile devices generally requires a lot of thought. There are plenty of design issues to consider, and even when you think you’ve finished you’ll still need to test the site thoroughly to confirm that all is well. (Just browsing a few pages with your iPad almost certainly won’t be good enough.)
Grab a copy of the free Keynote Mobile Internet Testing Environment (MITE), though, and the process of properly analysing your site could prove easier than you think. While it’s comes packed with essential testing functionality, MITE’s core capabilities are so simple to use that anyone can get at least something from the program.
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