Latest Technology News

Microsoft loves its MVPs -- most valued professionals -- and for good reasons. The company sells few products direct, relying instead on the skills of third-parties to promote and service solutions. MVPs receive special status and act, among other things, as crucial evangelists.

In case you missed it (I did being on vacation August 2), Microsoft is holding a contest for its MVPs through October 3. They submit "video tips" for which they can receive ongoing drawings for Microsoft points or grand prize, which varies by country. For example: Samsung Series 5 laptop in Canada and Dell Vostro in the United States.

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Android cameras are not a new concept, but for Nikon they are. The company today announced release of its first Android-powered camera, the CoolPix S800c. Rather than Jelly Bean, the shooter relies on much older Android 2.3 Gingerbread. So Polaroid got there faster, but that didn't stop Nikon from releasing the $349.95 camera.

It's a rather unusual package and you might wonder how Nikon manages to make the best out of Android when it doesn't have cellular connectivity. The CoolPix S800c makes due with Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n to share the photos or movies to cloud services. Because it's running Android, Google Play is open for those seeking to install third party applications within the 680MB of space reserved for it.

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Wednesday, eBay's online payment subsidiary PayPal announced it had partnered with credit company Discover to bring PayPal payments to an estimated seven million merchant locations across the United States. Beginning in the second quarter of 2013, consumers will be able to make payments with their PayPal accounts at the registers of these merchants.

Merchants looking to accept PayPal payments will have to upgrade their point of sale hardware or software, and PayPal's digital wallet technologies will be accepted. eBay on Wednesday did not go into significant detail about the mechanics of how payments will be administered, but it falls in line with the company's previous announcements about PayPal moving offline and Discover simultaneously improving its online presence.

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I spend a lot of time defending educational as opposed to purely technical solutions to security. Not that I don’t believe in the usefulness of technical solutions. However, there are many people in the security business who believe that education is a waste of time because it isn’t 100-percent effective. Unfortunately, you can make the very same argument against any technological solution. Randy Abrams and I discussed that conflict of ideas at some length in a paper for AVAR: see People Patching: Is User Education Of Any Use At All? And Robert Slade made some excellent points more recently in post Security unawareness.

Static passwords are a pretty good example of a technology that’s proved to be less than 100-percent effective time and time again, yet is considered effective enough to remain the authentication mainstay of many a web service. Well, I could argue that it’s not so much about effectiveness, as a trade-off between effectiveness in terms of privacy, and the cost of implementing better authentication mechanisms. But that’s a discussion for another time.

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When film director Tony Scott committed suicide, Apple quickly put up a tribute to him on the iTunes store. Except the page is less of a tribute and more of a shop window. Underneath a picture of Scott, and a brief biography, are links to all of his movies available to rent or buy from Apple. It doesn’t mention his death, at all, just lumps all of his films together into a collection that’s prominently listed on the front Films screen.

When I first encountered the so-called tribute page, I was a little dismayed. When someone dies, the proper etiquette is to mourn them, and to reflect on their lives and on their achievements. It isn’t, generally, to try and make a quick buck from their passing. But that’s exactly what Apple has done here -- and it's not the first time.

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UK company Ergo Electronics on Wednesday officially launched GoNote, a 10-inch touchscreen netbook powered by Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. While there have been numerous low-cost Android netbooks over the years, Ergo Electronics claims to have created a new category with the GoNote, the "hybrid touchscreen netbook."

The price is a reasonable GBP 149.99, and it will be available with a black or white chassis starting in September 2012. For this price, buyers will get a 10-inch 16:9 LED backlit screen with a 1024x600 resolution, powered by a 1.2GHz ARM Rockchip RK2918 CPU (based on the ARM Cortex A8 architecture,) aided by 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage. A microSD card slot is available, allowing users to extend the storage capacity by 32GB for a total of 40GB. It comes with four USB 2.0 ports, a mini HDMI 1.3 port, 3.5mm jack for audio output and microphone and a VGA forward-facing camera is thrown as well into the mix. In terms of Internet connectivity, the GoNote comes with an Ethernet port and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n. The 9000mAh battery provides a quoted battery life of 6 hours for video playback and roughly a week of standby.

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Want to know the specifications of a computer? You could look at the manufacturer’s website, but you’ll probably find that there is a limit to the level of detail provided. Similarly, if you want to know how fast your machine is, there is little point relying on figures quoted by the manufacturer, if you want to know how it performs in the scenarios you are using it in. AIDA64 is one of the most advanced benchmarking and diagnostic tools available and the release of version 2.60 sees the addition of support for Windows 8 as well as the latest hardware.

Benchmarks are a great way to see how one system compares to another, and they also provide a means of checking exactly what difference, if any, tweaks and hardware upgrades make to the performance of your computer. There is support for a massive range of hardware, so whether you are using an aging machine, or something more cutting edge, you should be able to find out everything you need to know.

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One of the most frustrating aspects of dealing with media files is that seemingly identical files are anything but. Why is it you’re able to play one AVI video file, but not another? How come that .MP4 video plays flawlessly, but this one just won’t open?

The problem is that the three-letter file extension is just part of the makeup of a video file. You need to identify the actual codecs used to render the audio and video, which can be tricky without third-party help. Thankfully, there’s a free tool that can identify those codecs for you in the form of MediaInfo Lite.

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Symantec is a company with many strings to its bow but is most often associated with security software. Those with long memories will remember Norton Utilities, a tweaking tool for Windows that Symantec bought. The Norton name lives on and Norton Mobile Utilities revives the Utilities genre for Android users. The tool is designed to help your Android device more efficiently, and the release of version 2.0 of the app sees it splitting into two branches -- free, and paid-for premium versions.

The free version of the app, now referred to as Norton Mobile Utilities Lite, gives users greater control over memory usage, making it easy to terminate apps to free up resources. There are a number of informational components to the app, and these will tell you everything from how much battery life you have left, details of the hardware you are using and how much storage space you have available.

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Great news for those seeking truly unlimited data plans. T-Mobile has announced that starting September 5, it will offer unlimited data plans in the United States. The carrier claims that their unlimited data plans are an industry-first, having no data caps, speed limits or "bill shocks". All sounds like great news, but what's the cost?

New customers can chose to bring their own smartphone or select a new one from T-Mobile's lineup, while existing customers on Classic or Value plans must upgrade to an Unlimited Nationwide 4G Data Plan to benefit from the new unlimited data plans. The Unlimited Nationwide 4G Data Plan costs $30 per month when combined with a Classic voice and text plan and $20 per month along with a Value voice and text plan.

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For the other three people using Chromebook, Google hasn't forgotten us. Whoo-hoo! The company continues to iterate Chrome OS, and with each rev takes it further from the cloud and closer to earth. I like my Chromebook, but even I shake my head and laugh at the amazing innovations. Well, they were in 1995.

Last year when first introduced to Chromebook, I worked solely in a browser. Now Chrome OS is this molten half-browser/cloud, half-desktop mutation -- like the two-headed creature from "The Thing". But the motifs are all ancient desktop OS, which is such a step back from the cloud-connected device era. Shouldn't Chrome OS move forward.

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Amazon Web Services on Tuesday announced Glacier, a new cloud storage service specifically aimed at data archival, backups, and other long-term storage projects where data is accessed only infrequently.

Even though the cost of on-premise backup solutions continues to drop, Amazon seeks to cut as much of the cost as possible with its cloud-based solution. For example, the service can cost as little as one cent per gigabyte per month, with upload and retrieval requests costing five cents per thousand requests, and outbound data transfer (i.e. moving data from one AWS region to another) costing 12 cents per gigabyte if under 10 TB per month. Per gigabyte rates decrease as the amount of transferred data increases. These rate tiers count aggregate usage across Amazon Glacier, Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Storage Gateway, and Amazon VPC.

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Adobe Systems has released a new version of Muse, its coding-free web design tool, and the program is packed with significant additions and updates.

A new Forms widget, for instance, makes it easy to add a custom form to your page. Alignment tools help you align page objects in relation to each other, and asset support means you can now link to PDF files, archives, executables and more, ready for your visitors to download.

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I must preface by clearly stating that I absolutely love my Nexus 7. I recommended it to dozens of people, and fully plan to hand out a few as birthday gifts before the year is over. The tablet is incredibly solid, and worth every penny of the $200 selling price. As far as hardware is concerned, Nexus 7 is remarkable in nearly every aspect.

That said, Google’s approach to Android 4.1 on this device leaves me with a sense of practiced uncertainty and no clue where the tablet fits into the Android ecosystem.

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Software company Adobe Inc. on Tuesday pushed out Preview 7 of Edge, the timeline-based animation product that utilizes non-plugin Web protocols HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript. With this preview, Adobe has changed the name of the product to Edge Animate, perhaps better illustrating its intended use.

Since the last preview, released in May, Adobe has changed a little bit of everything, it's added new layouts, new tools, new keyboard shortcuts, and enhanced the stage, the timeline, the code editor, and overall usability.

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