An Apple Christmas Carol
Tim Cook smiled as he pulled up the blankets and shook his toes against the cool sheets. Christmas Eve had come and the last Apple Store closed. Preliminary sales were gangbusters. Wall Street analysts betrayed him with lowered share price targets and projections iPad and iPhone sales slowed. But he knew! Cook laughed and kicked his legs under the covers. The best fourth quarter for sure! Occasional giggles broke the silence until at last -- long last -- sleep became him.
But briefly, for rattling chains startled Apple's CEO from slumber. Chunk. Chunk. Chunk. The clanking grew louder and an ominous dragging sound with it. A frightening wail followed. Pain. Great pain! Then through the wall pushed out an apparition. Ghastly yellow eyes squinted behind a face sullen, sunken and seemingly familiar. Tattered black turtle neck and blue jeans -- the uniform worn by his predecessor and mentor. Realization pierced Cook, and he felt a burning hot fire in his solar plexus. Steve Jobs!
Have a safe Christmas with Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition
It’s taken a little longer than we were expecting, but Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition is now available in an English language version. And if what you most want for Christmas is a lightweight and very simple antivirus tool, then this could be very good news indeed.
The program offers a reasonable core feature set, with basic real-time protection, simple on-demand scanning (right-click any file or folder in Explorer for a “Scan with Bitdefender” option), and system scans that will run automatically when your system is idle.
My Precious, Bilbo Baggins uses Windows Phone
If you can say nothing else about the company, you at least have to admit that Microsoft has certainly come up with some unique marketing ideas recently. Many would call that a departure from the past, when the ads were either boring or just plain weird (remember Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld)? The company went from that to self-parody and real humor like the recent Internet Explorer 10-Mayan apocalypse campaign.
Now the mobile side of the business has rolled out a new website to let customers know that Bilbo Baggins, of Hobbit fame, is a Windows Phone 8 customer. The site lets you see Bilbo's home screen so that you can get some insight into what is important to the adventurous hobbit, like his map of "home sweet shire" and the current weather conditions in Middle Earth. You can even view his camera roll which, of course, he stores in his SkyDrive account.
Google provides direct access to Santa's Dashboard
It’s a good thing Santa Claus doesn’t rely on Apple Maps to plan his route, or there would be a very unhappy bunch of children this Christmas. As it turns out, the bearded beneficent one uses Google Maps to make sure all of the presents he’s bringing to good little boys and girls get to the correct destination on time. He's not daft you know.
If you’re not already tracking the progress of the big fat man with the long white beard using the Google Santa Tracker for Android or NORAD’s website, mobile or Windows 8 apps, there’s a new Santa’s Dashboard site from Google which will provide up to the minute details of where he is at the moment. This shows Santa’s previous location, his next location, when he’s likely to arrive there, the number of presents delivered, the distance travelled, and his status. There’s also a compass, and a list of names of deserving children.
Visions: organize and view your photos in 3D
Launch most image managers, even for the first time, and you’ll feel immediately at home. And that’s because they tend to follow very similar designs. You’ll have album or folder groupings on the left, and image thumbnails on the right; double-clicking something displays it full-screen; right-clicking gives you more options; and in just a few seconds you’ll have a very good understanding of what the program can do.
This is all very easy to use, then. But some say there are better ways to browse your images. Visions, for instance, drops the usual flat folders to present your photos in a configurable 3D interface, which (the developers claim) offers all kind of image management benefits. Really? We downloaded a copy to find out more.
3 million Verizon accounts stolen -- Q&A with the person claiming to be behind it
A report surfaced today that Verizon Wireless, a premier mobile carrier in the United States has been breached, with a result of three million customers being compromised. The good news is that the compromise does not seem to be malicious. The bad news is that, as proof of this, 300,000 users' data was released.
While the number may seem large, it represents a small fraction of the company's user base. Still, any customer information released into the wild is bad. So how did this happen and how bad is it?
Dropbox preview release available for Android, delivers opt-in for experimental builds
For early adopters that prefer to live on the bleeding edge of technology, popular cloud storage service Dropbox unveiled a new preview release. The most noteworthy feature for keen beta users is the ability to receive updates to future early and final releases.
The current preview build also introduces the option to share multiple pictures at once. The functionality is enabled by a long tap on a photo and selecting the remaining ones afterwards. In a similar manner users can also organize pictures into albums, the latter of which can also be shared, and delete multiple photos.
Now you can record to your Android device via USB audio interface
Exstream Software Development, the team responsible for Android four-track app Audio Evolution Mobile, has released an app called USB Audio Recorder Pro which lets users attach USB microphones and other USB audio interfaces to Android 3.1+ devices that support USB host mode.
Musicians, podcasters, and filmmakers alike can now attach microphones to their Android tablet or smartphone and record mono or stereo 16- or 24-bit audio, and also play back over their USB device. Many of the recording variables depend upon the audio interface and Android device that are being used, but the maximum sample rate the app supports is 192 kHz, and files can be saved as wav/flacc/ogg on internal or removable storage.
4K Video Downloader claims to be different
While there are plenty of tools around which promise to help you download online videos, most have snags or compromises that make them annoying to use in real life. They don’t support your favorite sites, maybe; they don’t let you download the precise format or resolution you need; there are restrictions on downloading videos simultaneously, or whatever it might be.
4K Video Downloader claims to be different, though. “Downloading is simple and pleasant”, the authors say. The program covers “YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, Dailymotion and Metacafe”, and you’ll want to use it because “we pay great attention to simplicity and usability”. Interesting, but can the reality live up to the hype? We took a look.
That's not iPad 4, it's the new Archos 97 Titanium HD
Apple's newest iPad and mainstream Android tablets couldn't be more different in the display department -- the former embraces a more conservative 4:3 format while the latter prefer the multimedia-oriented widescreen panels. However, French consumer electronics company Archos deviates from the norm with the 97 Titanium HD, an Android tablet with an iPad 4-like display.
The 97 Titanium HD tablet features a 9.7-inch IPS display with 10 point multitouch and a resolution of up to 2048 x 1536. Power comes from a 1.6GHz dual-core processor based on the A9 architecture, a quad-core Mali 400 MP4 graphics card and 1GB of RAM, a combination similar to the one found in the original Samsung Galaxy Note. The tablet also sports 8GB of internal memory, alongside a microSD card slot that can extend the storage capacity by a further 64GB. What about the software?
Microsoft makes Windows Azure even better
On Friday, Microsoft unveiled a host of new features for the company's cloud platform, Windows Azure. The latest update beefs up the software corporation's offering by expanding the availability of Windows Azure Store into more regions as well as adding support for Mobile Services in Northern Europe.
Microsoft states that the company also plans to extend support for Mobile Services to "all Windows Azure regions world-wide", but did not provide any specific details as to when that will happen. The Redmond, Wash.-based corporation touts a number of other changes in the last Windows Azure update to Mobile Services, Web Sites, Media Services, SQL databases, Virtual Network improvements as well as Subscription Filtering support.
Amazon finally brings Instant Video to Android, but there is a catch
Amazon is Netflix's biggest competitors, but the company had a gaping hole in its armor. While the app works just fine on the Kindle Fire tablets, it was MIA for every other Android user out there. Now the retail giant has finally made the service available to other users on the popular platform, but before you get excited, there is a catch, and it is a big one.
When you find the app in the Google Play store you will immediately notice two things -- one is that it only works with version 3.2 and up of the OS. The other is even more troubling. The app is for Google TV only. Even the new flagship Nexus devices are not capable of using it.
Oracle releases VirtualBox 4.2.6
Oracle has announced the release of VirtualBox 4.2.6, the latest edition of its powerful cross-platform virtualization tool. This is a maintenance release, and so looks more or less unchanged. But the build does include plenty of welcome bug fixes and other small improvements.
VBoxManage now properly converts disks from raw images, for instance. It improves media handling, supports new metrics for “network rate” and “disk usage”, and includes fixes to ensure other metrics are now properly handled. An El Torito BIOS fix should help when you need to boot VMs from a CD. Windows Additions has been tweaked to work better with Windows 8 and Windows 2000.
Best Windows 8 apps this week (Doomsday Edition)
Eighth in a series. Since the world is going down today anyway there is not really much need for today's article and while I thought for a moment about taking the day off, I'd like the idea of leaving the world with work done. So, here it is, the eighth part of the best Windows 8 apps of the week series on Doomsday.
Pssst: If the world doesn't end, and you have Windows 8, now you have something to look forward to.
Amazon rounds out EC2 lineup with top-of-the-line High Storage instances
Catering to applications that need to query huge stores of data very quickly, Amazon announced High Storage instances for its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) cloud application platform on Friday. They fall in line with Amazon's High CPU, High Memory, and High I/O instances.
These instances offer users 35 ECUs (also known as an EC2 Compute Unit, the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor), 117 Gibibytes of RAM, and 48 Terabytes of storage spread out across 24 HDDs. With 10 Gigabit Ethernet, these instances can offer 2.4 Gigabytes per second of sequential I/O.
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