I travel a lot. One day I might be in Australia, next day Japan and then off to the United States. Why such a hectic schedule? It's all about how the antivirus industry cooperates. I've been in meetings. Specifically, I've been in meetings with our competitors.

I've now been working with computer viruses for more than 20 years. During this time I've come to realize that the antivirus industry is quite unique in the way direct competitors help each other. It's not publicly known, but antivirus companies like F-Secure, Symantec, McAfee, Trend Micro and others help each other out all the time.

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Love for the iPhone and the rest of the Apple portable device family appears to know no bounds, but as soon as you connect it to a computer the niggles start. While an iPod may be sleek and user friendly, the same can't be said of iTunes. Simply adding a new album or removing a couple of tracks can become a deeply frustrating experience with long sync times and annoying waits. It seems very irritating that you can't simply drag and drop the MP3 files that you want to play into your device.

With CopyTrans Manager, this is precisely what you can do. It's a free component of the larger CopyTrans Suite that provides a wider range of iPod/iPad/iPhone management functions. You have to pay for the additional functions, but the ability to manage tracks on your iPod is free. Even more impressing is that the program enables you to manage multiple devices on the same computer without undue fuss.

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The Fuji FinePix X100. It's one of the more talked about and lusted after cameras on the market right now. It's also one quirky beast full of contrasts. Reviewers are quick to point out every annoying flaw, yet are also quick to tell you how much they love it and the resulting images. Thanks to a generous friend, I finally had the chance to test drive it myself for an afternoon.

First Impressions

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Dealing with media files can be a bind, especially video ones as the sheer number of permutations for each file can seem infinite. If you're editing video it really helps to get everything in the same format or at the very least know the format of the files you're using to ensure that your PC can handle them properly.

Generally when you right click a file in Windows and choose "Properties", you can find some basic information, including embedded data for the likes of music files that may include the title, artist, originating album and bitrate amongst others. You don't get full access to information about the codec used to produce the file or much of the key information that can help you to play a stubborn file, so you can find the right software to make it render properly.

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Yes, they are. But I think it's the right decision.

I recently acquired an iPad -- 16GB, 3G with an AT&T data plan. After three days of use I found myself thinking about all the things I wanted to do with it but could not simply because it's a mobile OS and is primarily used for content consumption and not content creation. That's not to say there are not content creation apps for the iPad because there are. I'm simply saying that the majority use for this device is content consumption; and it does it very well.

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CyberLink released YouCam 5 this week. Although it's not an application that may be on everyone's radar, the new version does have a couple of interesting new features for serious users, one of these being facial recognition technology. This will enable you to login to Windows or Facebook without the need to remember your password. Use your webcam to recognize your facial features and you're in. At least in theory. YouCam 5 Standard is the basic version, whilst the Deluxe edition offers a stronger feature set, including the ability to lock your computer when your webcam notices you've moved away from your desktop.

Kaspersky's TDSSKiller 2.5.12.0 is a free tool designed to compliment your existing security software. Run a scan and it will detect a rootkit on your system, sniff out potential malicious files and report back. Detect anything suspicious and you can make a decision on whether you want to remove the files or not. However, TDSSKiller will give you another layer of protection and is ideal for users who want Kaspersky technology but have a subscription with a rival security software developer.

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Mozilla Thunderbird is a great cross platform email, newsgroup and RSS reader that's very configurable and open source. It lacks very little in these areas, but anyone used to Microsoft Outlook might well want to add in task list management and calendar features. Lightning is a free, open-source plugin that provides these features.

Lightning 1.0b5 has just been released, making the plugin compatible with both Thunderbird 5 Final and Thunderbird 6 Beta as well as fixing a number of problems reported with non-working calendars and disappearing alarms.

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Editor's note: This article was commissioned by Dell. To learn more about Dell's solutions for improving responsiveness while reducing costs with virtualization, please visit Dell's site by clicking here.

As hardware power increased over the years IT pros used to wonder about what we'd do with all that capacity, but no longer. Virtualization has enabled everyone, from SMBs to enterprise IT, to get better utilization out of their hardware and make management easier too.

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Editor's note: This article was commissioned by Dell. To learn more about Dell's solutions for improving responsiveness while reducing costs with virtualization, please visit Dell's site by clicking here.

Virtualization as a concept has become one of the most important technologies to come about in the modern PC era. The benefits are many: IT administrators love virtualization because it cuts down on administration and data center size and the bookkeepers approve of it as it cuts down on IT costs. Many businesses aren't taking advantage of its full benefits, however.

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Any Windows system degrades over time. The reason it becomes less effective is because it collects junk data. As you install programs, save and retrieve files and do all the things your computer was designed for, temporary files build up in hard-to-reach areas, data fragments get left behind and before you know it, you have a very messy system indeed. It's high time for a spring clean.

Instead of grabbing a mop and bucket, you'll need to strategically delete the unwanted data. Old programs don't just litter the place; they leave a mess in the registry and within some of Windows data folders. Eusing Cleaner 2 can help you to reclaim some speed by cleaning these out.

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Editor's note: Software developer Steve Lacey was killed in a tragic car crash on July 24th, reportedly when another driver accelerated in an unrelated road rage incident. In perhaps a sign of changing times, a number of notable geeks are writing their remembrances on Google+. Here, Robert Scoble shares about working with Lacey at Microsoft. More recently, Google employed Lacey.

When I first met Steve Lacey, back in 2004, he was working at Microsoft on the Flight Simulator team and I could instantly tell he was a geek's geek (e.g., a pioneer everyone looked up to). You can see the video we did together. (Silverlight required)

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Some people find watching foreign films with subtitles hard work, but it's even harder if the movie in question has no subtitles at all and you're not fluent in the relevant language. It's not just those with an inability to speak in tongues who benefit from subtitles either; they also help the hard of hearing, and there's the added benefit of being able to watch a video with the sound muted to avoid disturbing others too.

If you've got a movie or TV show you're desperate to watch, but there's no subtitle track included, don't fret. Sublight is a program for searching and downloading subtitles, simplifying and speeding up the process of both finding the right file and linking it to your movie.

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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.

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For the past few days I've been hanging out in Jackson Hole with a bunch of geeks and one thing I've noticed over and over is how boring Twitter has gotten when compared to Google+.

Why has Twitter turned boring?

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When Sony provided a select group of journalists and bloggers a sneak peek at the two new tablets planned to launch later this year, it also offered a glimpse into its strategy for separating itself from the growing pack of iPad rivals.

Along the way, Sony also gave us a gander at something else: The huge risk it's taking in coming to market with something so different, perhaps even too different, for you to buy.

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