Need a truly useful dictionary? Try TheSage
When you need to use a dictionary then the quickest solution is usually to head off online. There are plenty of excellent free services available, and if you’re just looking for a quick definition then they’ll probably do a very good job.
If you need more, though – more frequent lookups, better searching features, more options and control -- then there’s still a case for installing a dictionary application. And TheSage is the perfect example.
iPhone cracks against the Great Wall of China
The Chinese smartphone market is dominated by five top manufacturers, none of them Apple, Canalys reveals. As I've warned a couple times recently, despite CEO Tim Cook's prognostications about China's importance or his company boasting 2 million first-weekend iPhone 5 sales, competitors rapidly close out the market for costly fruit-logos.
China is the biggest market for mobiles, largely dominated by smartphones -- 73 percent of the total in fourth quarter, up from 40 percent a year earlier. Shipments soared 113 percent to 64.7 million units, or 30 percent of all smartphones globally. Samsung captured the top spot, followed by Lenovo, Yulong, Huawei and ZTE.
Don't expect too much from Rootkit Remover
Bitdefender Labs has released Bitdefender Rootkit Remover, a free stand-alone tool for dealing with known rootkits.
The company report that Rootkit Remover can remove infections from a wide range of threats, including Mebroot, all TDL families (TDL/SST/Pihar), Mayachok, Mybios, Plite, XPaj, Whistler, Alipop, Cpd, Fengd, Fips, Guntior, MBR Locker, Mebratix, Niwa, Ponreb, Ramnit, Stoned, Yoddos, Yurn, Zegost and Necurs, amongst others.
Accidental Empires Part 3 -- 1991 edition preface
Third in a series. Editor: In parts 1 and 2 of this serialization, Robert X. Cringely presents an updated intro to his landmark rise-of-Silicon Valley book Accidental Empires. Here he presents the original preface from the first edition.
The woman of my dreams once landed a job as the girls’ English teacher at the Hebrew Institute of Santa Clara. Despite the fact that it was a very small operation, her students (about eight of them) decided to produce a school newspaper, which they generally filled with gossipy stories about each other. The premiere issue was printed on good stock with lots of extra copies for grandparents and for interested bystanders like me.
More Americans take Facebook vacations
That's not on the social network but away from it. Bad for Facebook: The youngest, and presumably most active users, are the most likely to step away this year for prolonged breaks, according to Pew Internet.
"Sixty-one percent of current Facebook users say that at one time or another in the past they have voluntarily taken a break from using Facebook for a period of several weeks or more", according to report "Coming and Going on Facebook", which published this week.
Microsoft sends Live Mesh execution-date reminders
Perhaps it is just me, but Microsoft's decision to take Live Mesh off of life-support has hit especially hard. We knew this was coming of course, but still, I like having my files synced between multiple computers and, while I love SkyDrive, I do not need the cloud as an intermediary within my own home -- that is ridiculous overkill and would cost me money as well.
Today the company dispatched email reminders that began "Dear Mesh customer, Recently we released the latest version of SkyDrive, which you can use to..." Yes, thanks a lot. I know what I can use it for, but syncing between computers in my home is not something I should be compelled to use it for.
Believe it, smartphones and tablets make people use PCs less
What a difference three years make. In April 2010 I asked "Will iPad cannibalize Mac sales?" and a month later PC sales. Fast-forward 12 months, NPD answered a definitive "No". I disagreed: "Call me cynical and skeptical, but I'm convinced that changing behavior will cause many smartphone buyers, and many more tablet adopters, to delay PC upgrades".
Today, NPD sees things a little differently, based on fresh survey data that puts context behind two years of declining PC sales -- that despite Windows 8's release little more than three months ago. The firm finds that 37 percent of US consumers now access content on smartphones or tablets they used to on PCs. Changing behavior like this affects computer sales, as consumers shift behavior and delay PC upgrades or don't buy ever.
LibreOffice 4.0 arrives -- get it NOW!
The Document Foundation released LibreOffice 4.0 FINAL. The open-source, cross-platform productitivty suite, which is based on OpenOffice, has evolved to the point where the developers are happy to assign a major new version number.
Version 4.0 includes a number of relatively minor new features, but the big changes will come under the hood, marking the first radical development in the program’s API since the app it was built on -- OpenOffice -- was first released. Other changes include support for Firefox Personas, integration with CMS and online storage providers, plus support for importing both Microsoft Publisher and the latest VISIO documents.
What happens when Lego meets Android?
Nothing says geek quite like Lego. Come on -- you know you secretly still love those tiny multi-colored bricks from your youth. Except now they are not just bricks, and the simple projects of our youth have become the incredibly complex projects of our children's youth...that we still love to "help out" with.
Lego Cuusoo is a "Labs" type of project where customers can suggest future kits and if the item gets at least 10,000 supporters then Lego pledges to consider producing it. And now the company is faced with an Android project that easily passed that requirement yesterday evening.
Microsoft launches 'Don’t Get Scroogled by Gmail' campaign to stop Google 'going through personal emails'
Microsoft's efforts to downplay Google's Gmail over its own Outlook.com service are well known amongst the tech crowd. In late-November the Redmond, Wash.-based corporation claimed that a third of new Outlook.com signups were people switching from Google's email service, and after the web giant dropped support for EAS, Microsoft quickly advised Gmail users to make the same switch. Now Microsoft is at it again, launching a new crusade titled "Don't Get Scroogled by Gmail".
The purpose of the campaign, according to the software firm, is to "educate consumers that Google goes through their personal emails to sell ads". Don't Get Scroogled by Gmail is aimed at American Gmail users and is supported by a GfK Roper study commissioned by Microsoft that found "70 percent of consumers don’t know that major email providers routinely engage in the practice of reading through their personal email to sell ads", with a vast majority of people, 88 percent, disapproving of this practise once the information was brought to their attention.
Scarab Darkroom lets you view and edit RAW images
Take a photo with most digital cameras and by default you’ll get a JPG file, which is great for compatibility purposes, but does involve some compromises in image quality. And that’s because your picture will go through various processes before the final JPG is produced -- sharpening, adjusting colors and contrast, compressing the results -- and each step results in the loss of some information.
Take pictures using a camera’s RAW format, though (if it has one), will give you access to the full and unprocessed image data. And you can then apply any tweaks you like on a case by case basis, for the best possible results. You’ll probably need a specialist tool to access the RAW images, but that may not be a problem: Scarab Darkroom, for instance, is a very capable RAW converter with support for cameras by Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Panasonic, Pentax, Samsung, and Sony, and you can download it and it entirely for free.
GIMP 2.8.4 adds improvements and polish to the popular image editor
Popular open-source image editor GIMP 2.8.4 FINAL has been released for Linux and Windows, with a Mac binary build due for release imminently. Version 2.8.4 is a minor stability release, but does contain a number of interesting improvements, including more responsive drawing -- particularly with the brush outline tool -- plus better names for the default filters when saving or exporting.
GIMP 2.8.4 will also be the second OS X release that runs natively on the Mac -- 2.8.0 and earlier required X11, and many improvements in this release are aimed specifically at that platform.
Employees frequently steal (and use) confidential data when switching jobs
According to Symantec, businesses are increasingly at risk of insider IP theft, with staff moving, sharing and exposing sensitive data on a daily basis and, worse still, taking confidential information with them when they change employers.
A new survey conducted by The Ponemon Institute, and based on responses from 3,317 individuals in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Brazil, China and Korea, shows that half of employees admit to taking corporate data when they leave a job, with 40 percent saying they intend to use the data in their new position.
Updated evasi0n iOS 6.x jailbreak now available
Three days ago evad3rs released the first public iOS 6 jailbreak tool, opening up iPads, iPhones and iPod touch devices to the world of underground modding. But as is the case with the majority of infant jailbreak-related releases it also brought along a series of bugs, which the team behind the project now claims to have fixed in the latest update.
On Twitter, planetbeing, one of the three members behind evad3rs, announced the release of evasi0n 1.1. The second iteration of the popular jailbreaking tool brings along "the latest fixes", which are supposed to sort the Weather app and "long boot" time issues. The latter problem is also referred to by the team as the "reboots getting stuck" bug.
Accidental Empires Part 2 -- 1996 edition preface
Second in a series. Editor: Robert X. Cringely is serializing his classic Accidental Empires , yesterday with a modern intro and today with the two past ones. The second edition of the book coincided with release of documentary "Triumph of the Nerds". The intros provide insight into a past we take for granted that was future in the making then. Consider that in 1996, Microsoft had a hit with Windows 95 and Apple was near bankruptcy.
The first edition of Accidental Empires missed something pretty important -- the Internet. Of course there wasn’t much of a commercial Internet in 1990. So I addressed it somewhat with the 1996 revised edition, the preface of which is below. Later today we’ll go on to the original preface from 1990.
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