openSUSE 13.1 is here!
When it comes to Linux, I am very flaky. You see, I tend to never settle on a specific distro. While I always seem to end up on Fedora, I do tend to cheat. Yes, I am monogamous for the most part, but I can be found canoodling with Mint, Netrunner and openSUSE from time to time. The latter operating system is well-known for being rock-solid and well-supported. My wandering eye is always keeping tabs on the chameleon-logo distribution and today, there is big news.
"Dear contributors, friends and fans: The release is here! Eight months of planning, packaging, adding features, fixing issues, testing and fixing more issues has brought you the best that Free and Open Source has to offer, with our Green touch: Stable and Awesome", says Jos Poortvliet, community manager at SUSE.
Dropbox teams with Salesforce for new enterprise functionality
Dropbox, one of the leading services for cloud storage, has been making recent inroads to become business and IT-friendly. The company boasts that its business user-base has doubled since 2012, and now reaches over four million customers. To keep that fire stoked, Dropbox now announces a new partnership with Salesforce.
"Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re partnering with Salesforce to bring great technology to the enterprise and help users connect with customers in a whole new way", says the company's Ari Friedland.
Bing on Xbox One makes it easy to search for entertainment
With just a few days left until the Xbox One goes on sale, Microsoft is pushing the features and benefits of its new console, focusing on everything except games.
Today, it’s the turn of Bing to step into the spotlight, with a new blog post detailing the search engine’s vital role on the system. Stefan Weitz, Senior Director, Bing explains "Whether your game, show, song or movie is in an app, on your console, or in our own Xbox Music or Xbox Video, the same instant search technology that powers Bing web search also brings your entertainment results together beautifully on your TV".
Sound Valley brings the relaxing sounds of nature to your PC
Working on your PC isn’t generally a great way to wind down, but if you’re stressed out after a hard day then Sound Valley might be able to help. It’s a small and simple tool which plays the sounds of nature -- birdsong, wind in the trees, rain, streams and more -- gently in the background, while you just relax.
The program looks like a simple but stylish media player. Click "Play" and Sound Valley plays its first scene, "Forest -- Day". You’ll hear a stream gurgling nearby, various birds singing, perhaps the rustle of the undergrowth in the background. It’s nicely done, and very restful.
AIDA64 adds new OpenCL GPGPU Benchmark Suite, and dedicated Network Audit product
Budapest-based FinalWire Ltd has launched AIDA64 Extreme Edition 4.00 and AIDA64 Business Edition 4.00, major new builds of its diagnostic and benchmarking tools for Windows PCs.
The new release updates support for the latest CPU, GPU and SSD models, adds a new OpenCL GPGPU benchmark suite and expands its business offering to provide a new dedicated Network Audit tool (users should complete this form to test-drive this new product).
Nokia sale to Microsoft reaches the Finnish line
While products are typically produced by corporations and businesses, the brands themselves are often adopted by societies and become icons. Some examples are Coca-Cola (USA), BlackBerry (Canada) and Nokia (Finland). Sadly, for the latter country, the associated company has been in talks to become acquired by Microsoft (USA).
Some citizens of Finland may have hoped for the acquisition to fail in the eleventh-hour, but unfortunately for them, the sale has been approved. According to Nokia, at a meeting that took place today, it "decided to confirm and approve the sale of substantially all of Nokia's Devices & Services business to Microsoft in line with the proposal and recommendation of the Nokia Board of Directors. More than 99-percent of the votes cast at the EGM were in favor of this proposal".
Easily delete locked files with Reboot Delete File Ex
Deleting files on a PC is normally very easy. If they’re locked, though -- being accessed by another program -- then Windows won’t allow you to touch them. Tools like Unlocker try to help out by unlocking the files themselves, but this is a dangerous approach which risks crashing your PC. Reboot Delete File Ex offers a marginally alternative: point the program at the offending file and it’ll have Windows to delete it when your system next restarts.
There’s nothing complicated to this process at all, but the program still requires installation, most probably because it wants to equip your PC with a toolbar. If you’re not interested then watch carefully during setup, and click "Decline" as appropriate.
PlayOn brings Chromecast-like functionality to Roku
Much has been made of Google's little Chromecast device -- the dongle that allows you to send media from computers and mobile devices to your TV. The $35 device has received a fair amount of attention and also a bit of mimicry, with services like Cheapcast popping up.
Now, TV streaming service PlayOn is teaming with set-top box maker Roku to bring similar functionality to customers of the two services. "PlayCast gives users the ability to stream virtually any online video from a PC browser to a Roku-connected TV. It is like Chromecast casting for the Roku", PlayOn says in a brief statement received by BetaNews.
Top 10 most wanted Black Friday products -- PS4 beats Xbox One
Every year in the United States, on the fourth Thursday of November, we gather with our families for Thanksgiving -- a holiday for, of course, giving thanks. Typically, we share a meal of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and various other side dishes. The men watch Football while the women and children watch the parade. It is surely a wonderful day that evokes positive emotion.
Then, at midnight, Black Friday begins and we throw all of that out the window. Consumers, still woozy from tryptophan, line up at stores to buy mass-produced products. Only hours removed from giving thanks, they trample their fellow man in a mad-dash to save a few dollars. Sadly, people actually die as a result. With that said, here are the top 10 most wanted Black Friday products.
MetroMail -- a really good Gmail client for Windows Phone 8
Google is renowned for its lack of Windows Phone 8 support. The search giant currently has a single app in Store -- which, surprisingly, just received a nice update, its first big one since March 2012 -- with no plans on the horizon to bring popular apps like Drive, Gmail, Google+, Maps or YouTube to the tiled smartphone operating system.
Being a user myself, I can see why some folks would give up on waiting for the real deal and start to embrace a third-party app or switch to a rival service instead. Fortunately, developers have released competent clients for Google services, like MetroMail that provides a solid Gmail experience in the absence of an official Windows Phone 8 app.
BleachBit now digitally signed, adds Explorer integration
It’s taken almost five years to get there, but disk cleanup and shredding tool BleachBit has finally reached version 1.0 with some welcome new features.
The Windows installer and executable are now digitally signed, so users shouldn’t be hassled with "unknown publisher" alerts any more.
Google will pay you for improving Android security
Android's success, in the smartphone and tablet markets, makes the operating system's users a popular target for malware writers. Some of the concerns which researchers and security firms frequently expose translate into real threats, while others will likely never see the light of day as they're squashed in their infancy.
Luckily, Google is taking a proactive stance to improving Android's security as the search giant has expanded the patch reward program that was introduced in early October, to also include its Android Open Source Project.
Easily retrieve 200+ product keys with Windows License Key Dump
Reinstalling Windows and your applications is a hassle for many reasons, but the greatest is probably the time it takes to find your various license keys. Are they on a CD box, a sleeve, in an email, online, somewhere else? You’ll have hours of fun finding out.
Windows License Key Dump can help by finding the product key for Windows, along with many other applications (Acrobat, Creative Suite, Photoshop, Norton Internet Security, TuneUp Utilities, VMWare Workstation and so on), and displaying them all in a single report.
Metalogix streamlines moving business email to the cloud
Email is often cited as being the killer application that made the internet take off, and there's no denying it has changed the way the world does business. But using email for business means keeping an archive so that you have a record of conversations. Over time that archive can become substantial and take up a lot of expensive disk space so storing it in the cloud begins to look like an attractive solution.
To help with moving mail to the cloud Metalogix is launching its Total Email Management and Migration product for Amazon Web Services. It delivers a complete service for mail archiving, backup, security, migration and continuity in the cloud.
Adobe Brackets is a powerful source code editor for the web
If you’ve tried more than your share of source code editors, then Brackets probably won’t make much of a first impression. It may have been launched by Adobe in 2012, but this open-source tool still looks a little basic, not something you’d want to use for serious work.
Actually try the program, though, and you’ll soon feel very differently. It’s very much a work-in-progress (the project is still only at version 0.34), but already Brackets is proving to be a capable editor with some very interesting features.
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