Gmail is back up, but strange problem persists
There is something to be said for the cloud and web-based services. However, when you rely on these things, sometimes it goes a bit wrong. That's not as bad as it sounds. It can go very wrong with your home computer and network as well. Today, Google is experiencing one of those "glitches".
As of this writing, the Gmail service seems to be restored for all users, and I've inquired with writer friends around the US and the world to verify that. However, there is a rather bizarre side-effect, but it's only affecting one poor user. Sadly, that person is getting the bulk of the email being sent since the outage relented.
My Mac Moment
Macintosh is 30 years old. If this were "Logan's Run", January 24 would be Last Day. Or the 1960s, time to ditch the computer because, you know, don't trust anyone (or anything) over 30. Declaration: I am a Mac user, which surely surprises the long line of people accusing me of being anti-Apple. My Mac sojourn started on a Winter's day in December 1998. I've abandoned Apple a few times since, even briefly boycotting, but always come back.
My first Macintosh sighting was August 1984. I spent the summer in Chapel Hill, N.C. and often hung out on the University of North Carolina campus. The college book store displayed the Apple, which I found remarkable. I wasn't a computer geek, nor am I one now, but nevertheless found the device charming. A decade later, I started using a Windows PC and for a while was a Macintosh bigot. I particularly enjoyed ribbing the graphic designers with whom my wife worked when their Macs crashed, wiping out hours of Photoshop or QuarkXpress work. "Get a PC!" was my common retort.
Automatically add clipart-style masks to on-screen faces with Funny Mask
If you want to have a little fun with a picture of someone, then you could open it in a graphics editor, draw on glasses, add a clipart wig, maybe a hat. But if that sounds like too much work, you could just use Funny Mask to do much the same thing, at a click.
The program is small, portable and easy to use. Just launch it, and click "Draw On Screen". Funny Mask uses OpenCV (the Open Source Computer Vision Library) to look for faces, and adds one of twelve silly customizations to anything it finds (wigs, glasses, hats, a mustache, and more).
WinPatrol 2014 debuts tweaked user interface, better performance
BillP Studios has unveiled the 30th major version of its snapshot-based security tool with the release of WinPatrol 30.0.2014. Although this release isn’t a beta, it’s been billed as a "Preview", with many additional enhancements -- including support for international date formats -- promised to follow.
What is already present in the new release is an interface redesign, improved performance, enhanced reporting, new cookie support, better handling of Windows Update and a tweaked Delayed Start function.
GifCam records screen activity as an animated GIF
Screen recorders are a great way to show others what’s happening on your desktop, as we saw with oCam earlier this month. But they usually save their results as videos, which can be a problem if you want to be sure they can be viewed by anyone, on any device (you’re embedding them in a website, for example).
GifCam can help by recording your desktop activity as an animated GIF. This means you won’t be able to include audio, of course, and file sizes will be larger. But they’ll be accessible to everyone, everywhere -- and the program is far better at tuning the results than you might think.
Best Windows 8 apps this week
Sixty-fifth in a series. Growth has been almost negative this week. Not because of a lack of new applications published to Windows Store, but because of Microsoft's continuing clean-up operations.
About 500 apps were removed from the Tools category alone, and slower than usual growth in other categories is an indicator that Microsoft removed apps from other categories as well in this week.
Nokia's swan song
Yesterday, Nokia posted its final financial results before the Microsoft deal closes. Unfortunately, the part of Nokia being sold to Microsoft doesn't seem to be in great shape. Nokia's recent traction with the Lumia range seems to have stalled as it announced a 7 percent sequential decline in unit sales. Let's take a brief look at the causes of the decline and what Microsoft is really buying.
The chart above shows Lumia shipments and ASPs for the past eight quarters. As we can see the Lumia's ASP (Average Selling Price) has continued to decline as shipments grew. This reinforces the fact that the Lumia sales mix was dominated by low-end variants -- primarily the Lumia 520. We need to keep this in mind while examining the cause of the Q4 decline in shipments.
Eric Schmidt warns of a war between computers and humans -- he hopes humans win
While the Terminator films were make-believe, there was definitely some real knowledge mixed in with Arnold's "Hasta La Vista" one-liners. The greatest take-away is machinery replacing humans. While I don't think my toaster will ever become self aware and kill me, the possibility of humans losing jobs to machines is very real and already happening.
I was recently invited to Detroit by Ford Motor Company, where I had the opportunity to tour the factory where the F150 truck is made. While much of the work is done by humans, I was taken aback by some of the quality inspection being done by robotic arms. Surely, that had been a human's role at some point and it made me a bit sad. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, warns that IT will suffer a similar fate as the automotive industry. In other words, there is a war brewing between humans and machines.
Best iOS apps this week
Fourth in a series. Unsurprisingly, after last week’s post-holiday rush of big and important new releases and updates, things have quietened down a little in the App Store.
There’s the usual collection of interesting apps and games, of course, but nothing massively groundbreaking this time around. That said, as ever, I’ve found plenty of apps to take up space on both my iPad and iPhone 5s.
Happy birthday to the Mac! 30 years and still going strong
Today is a day of celebration. Entering one's 30s is something of a milestone. It’s a time to look back at achievements, gather thoughts and see where the future is going to take you. 1984 was a big year. It's a year that will be permanently associated with George Orwell, the birth of my sister (happy birthday for today, by the way! Oh, and apologies for revealing your age!) and the first Mac. Three decades ago today, as my mum and dad were welcoming their daughter into the world, the technology world was welcoming the arrival of the Macintosh.
The Apple homepage has been taken over by a birthday message to the company's baby. Click through and there's a special mini-site that features a timeline of Mac evolution over the years. The intro page is both celebratory, forward-facing and a call to arms:
If Facebook is like a disease, I don't mind getting infected
Facebook has been in the news over the past few days after a report suggested that the social network is spreading in a similar way to a virus. Like all epidemics, the report suggests, the rate of infection will ultimately drop off, leading to the suggestion that by 2017 the social network will have shed 80 percent of its users. To which I -- and many others of reasonably sound mind -- cry "nonsense!" The catchily titled "Epidemiological modeling of online social network dynamics" paper published by, of all places, Princeton University puts forward the idea that Facebook users are set to abandon the social network in droves in the coming years.
Things don’t get off to a good start. In explaining the methodology, authors John Cannarella and Joshua A. Spechler say they will use "epidemiological models to explain user adoption and abandonment of OSNs [online social networks], where adoption is analogous to infection and abandonment is analogous to recovery". The abstract gets off on the wrong foot by suggesting that Facebook "is just beginning to show the onset of an abandonment phase" -- a wonderfully vapid term with no grounding in, well, anything really. It's easy to pick holes in papers that have slight flaws, but right from the start it is almost too easy here.
Microsoft Surface is a profit black hole, despite higher revenue
Yesterday, Microsoft released its earnings report for Q2 FY2014 (that is Q4 CY2013), revealing revenue of $24.52 billion and net income of $6.56 billion (78 cents per share). The Redmond, Wash.-based corporation has managed to beat the average analyst consensus of $23.68 billion and 68 cents per share respectively, as my colleague Joe Wilcox noted.
Aside from the strong overall results, there was another part of the earnings report which has caught our attention -- Surface sales. Revenue from Microsoft's Windows RT and Windows 8 tablets reached $893 million during the quarter. That is $493 million more than in the first fiscal quarter of the year. Good news, right? Surface is finally starting to take off, after all. Well, an SEC filling puts a damper on any enthusiasm, as Microsoft actually lost money on its tablets in Q2 FY2014.
Office 365 as an educational LMS? Microsoft video demos how it works
With as much time as I've spent in the education sector, as a student on one end and a high school IT specialist on the other, I know the landscape of educational learning management systems (LMS) decently well. And to be completely honest, it's a landscape rife with half-baked products delivering a fragmented me-too experience.
There's a lot to be desired from LMS environments, at least the one's I've played with in the last half decade. As a grad student at DePaul University (Chicago, IL USA) right now, I'm juggling between no less than three distinct platforms the school relies on.
Vine turns one today, happy birthday!
There are many social media networks nowadays. However, one of my favorites is Vine. If you aren't familiar, it is a video-sharing service with a twist -- the videos cannot be longer than six seconds. Not surprisingly, Vine is owned by Twitter -- another service that limits the duration of a user's communication. Both services teach us that limits breed creativity. In other words, forcing the user to make do with less creates unique solutions.
Vine takes this even further by introducing easy to use stop-motion. This allows the user to create things that appear magical, such as a person disappearing. While the video-service still feels fresh, surprisingly it is already a year old today!
Google will pay you up to $2.71828 million to hack Chromebooks
One of the most endearing things about Chrome OS is that it is very secure. Say what you want about it being nothing more than a browser. In reality, it is a Linux distribution where the user cannot install native software locally. The web-based nature of the OS makes it ideal for banking or accessing secure data. After all, without the possibility of installing software, the computer should be immune to malware.
I should watch my words because, the word "immune" simply makes the malware writers start salivating. After all, the belief that anything is 100-percent safe is the most dangerous thing of all. Not to mention, recently discovered rogue Chrome Extensions can be viewed as a form of malware. With that said, Google is challenging the world's best hackers to try and find holes in its Chromebooks. The carrot for which it dangles is a very healthy $2.71828 million!
Most Commented Stories
© 1998-2025 BetaNews, Inc. All Rights Reserved. About Us - Privacy Policy - Cookie Policy - Sitemap.