Wikipad Android gaming tablet gets specced, is it anything to write home about?
After attracting attention with news about its upcoming gaming tablet, Wikipad has made available the most important specs for their Wikipad tablet. According to a press release, it will be released at the end of the 3rd quarter of 2012 and it will be made available through worldwide major retailers.
Even though the Wikipad debuted last January at the Consumer Electronics Show 2012, not much was known about it. Most of the specs were unknown until today. The tablet is powered by an nVidia Tegra 3 1.4GHz quad-core processor paired with 1GB of DDR2 RAM and a 520MHz GPU, while the internal storage capacity will be at least 16GB. It has a 10.1-inch IPS display with a 16:10, 1280x800 resolution. It weighs 560 grams, and the thickness is 8.6 mm. Power comes from a 23.56Wh battery, which supposedly offers 8 hours of video playback and 6 hours of gaming time. An 8 megapixel rear-facing camera along with a 2 megapixel forward-facing camera are also included. To back up the "gaming" claim, the Wikipad tablet will come with a gaming controller add-on, which attaches itself to the Wikipad at the bottom through a proprietary connector. It will ship with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean out of the box.
iolo System Mechanic 11 supports Windows 8 but not Metro
LA software developer iolo Technologies has released a brand new version of its PC optimization and tuning suite, iolo System Mechanic 11. The tool is available in a range of editions, from a cut-down Free version to both Professional and Premium.
Version 11 introduces a number of new and enhanced features. New additions to the suite include AcceleWrite real-time optimization technology, expanded startup optimization and resource boosting tools, Windows 8 integration and a new unlimited home license covering all PCs in a single household.
Directory Monitor gives you the skinny on files and folders
Whether you’re concerned about security, system performance, or just wondering exactly why your PC’s hard drive has been constantly active for the last half hour, being able to see exactly which files are being created, modified or deleted right now can be very useful. And that’s why last month we told you about FolderChangesView, an excellent new NirSoft tool, which made it easy to track just that type of file system activity.
The program was a little short on configuration options, though. That’s hardly a great surprise -- at a tiny 65KB we’re lucky it does anything at all -- but if you need a little more folder-watching power then you may like to try the free Directory Monitor, instead.
Leap, the 'pocket Kinect' for PC attracts 26,000 interested developers
In May, San Francisco startup Leap Motion announced Leap, its pocket-sized 3D sensor designed to bring Kinect-like controls to notebook computers. At the time, the company said there would be "thousands" of free developer kits for interested developers who wanted to participate in the developer program. Today, the company has come forward with some numbers to show how staggeringly high interest is in the little peripheral.
Twenty six thousand (26,000) developers in 143 countries and all 50 U.S. states registered to be in Leap's developer program. A remarkable 15,000 of those requests came in the first week of the program's existence.
Twitter was wrong to suspend Guy Adams' account
Will you be next?
If you missed the controversy, read colleague Ed Oswald's "NBC pressures Twitter to shutter account of journalist critical of Olympics coverage", then come back for my reasons why Twitter cocked up. Royally. His headline says it all, if you'd like to keep reading here. For a service often praised for supporting free speech, Twitter suppresses Guy Adams', presumably to protect a media giant and business partner. The suspension should matter to anyone using cloud services or supporting online free speech.
U.S. reaches smartphone market peak, while the rest of the world keeps on going
Who would have guessed that it was time for the smartphone market to take a breath and slow down before the second half of 2012? Strategy Analytics released a report analyzing the U.S. smartphone market and shipments for Q2 2012, focusing on the two biggest smartphone operating systems, Android and iOS. The results make for an unexpected scenario: has the smartphone market reached its peak and if so, who’s the winning platform?
The Strategy Analytics report posts a decrease on smartphone shipment growth year-over-year with a 70.1 percent increase in 2011 and a 5.4 percent decrease for 2012, calling for a comparison with the report made available by IDC, which focuses on worldwide sales and market share. The differences between global results and those in the U.S. only suggest the U.S. market might have reached its peak, while worldwide smartphones are enjoying better sales.
NBC pressures Twitter to shutter account of journalist critical of Olympics coverage
As criticism over NBC's coverage of the 2012 Olympics in London grows, the network now finds itself at the center of a controversy surrounding its apparent involvement in the suspension of the Twitter account of an American journalist.
Guy Adams, the Independent's Los Angeles bureau chief, has been extremely critical of NBC's coverage of the games. In a series of tweets, Adams takes on NBC's decision to run almost no major event live, and Matt Lauer's sometimes inane banter during the Opening Ceremony coverage. Adams even went so far as to criticize NBC Olympics president Gary Zenkel.
Google+ Hangouts come to Gmail, joins group video chats with your inbox
Google on Monday announced it had expanded its almost four-year old Gmail Video Chat service to include Hangouts, the popular new Google+ group video chat service. Beginning today, users will be able to connect to Google+ Hangouts directly from their Gmail interface.
In 2008, Google's Gmail team rolled Google Talk with video chat into Gmail via a relatively small browser plug-in. That plug-in was actually a peer-to-peer client which enabled users to connect to their list of contacts via their respective messaging clients.
Google resumes 16GB Nexus 7 sales
When the larger model of the Nexus 7 vanished from the Play store a week ago, it was generally assumed that demand outstripped supply. After all, the tablet has been insanely popular since its launch, and pretty much sold out everywhere. The fact that the 8GB model was still available in the store just suggested that people were more interested in physical memory than cloud storage.
But then the conspiracy theories began to kick in. There had been a lot of complaints about the 16GB model prior to its disappearance, with most focusing on screen issues, which led my colleague Joe Wilcox to question whether the model had been withdrawn for reasons other than just overwhelming popularity. His article certainly struck a nerve and generated some interesting comments, including further complaints about the device. Could he be right? Was there more to the story than Google was telling us?
Have you looked at your .htacess file recently? Your Apache server may not be secure
If your organization’s website runs on Apache, and many do, you might wonder if the webserver’s .htaccess controls are securely configured. If you believe the demo we saw on July 27 at Black Hat by Matias Katz and Maximiliano Soler, the answer is a resounding ‘NO!’ What Katz and Soler describe in their session is not some rare “corner case” hack that could only possibly occur in a lab with billions of automated attempts, this is easily testable in the real world, and the tools to exploit it are freely available.
It turns out that Apache, the most commonly-used web server in the world, has an arrangement where it hands off PHP-based requests within .htaccess to PHP itself, which has worked fine on millions and millions of websites for years. But with .htaccess, you can specify what requests get sent to PHP to try to interpret. The usual methods are GET and POST, but if you feed the .htaccess process some non-standard input, PHP automatically (unless otherwise instructed) treats it as a GET request, and allows the utility to start saving the PHP files on a webserver to your local filesystem.
Virtual network architecture is hot: Oracle acquires Xsigo for undisclosed sum
Leading IT systems and technology company Oracle on Monday announced it will be acquiring privately-held company Xsigo Systems. Oracle targeted Xsigo for acquisition because of its network virtualization solutions, a hot zone in IT right now. Just one week ago, VMware announced the billion dollar acquisition of Nicira, a company that specializes in software-defined networking technology similar to Xsigo's.
"The proliferation of virtualized servers in the last few years has made the virtualization of the supporting network connections essential," said John Fowler, Oracle Executive Vice President of Systems in a prepared remark on Monday. "With Xsigo, customers can reduce the complexity and simplify management of their clouds by delivering compute, storage and network resources that can be dynamically reallocated on-demand."
If YouTube isn't the best place to watch the Olympic games, it should be
If you are living in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Brunei, Bhutan, Cambodia, East Timor, India, Indonesia, Iran, Laos, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritius, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, or Vietnam and want to watch the London Olympics today I’m told your only choice is YouTube. Ten events are available at any time through the International Olympic Committee (IOC) YouTube channel.
Of course 60 live channels are available in the USA through youtube.com/nbcolympics, but I think the international story is more compelling by far because it brings live competition to places where it was never available before.
Mountain Lion downloaded 3 million times in 4 days: what it means for market share
Apple released OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion on July 25, and based on that small sliver of time, data analysis company Chitika released a statistic forecasting Mountain Lion's adoption rate, claiming a 3.21 percent OS X market share in just 48 hours. Five days after the release, Apple has announced Mountain Lion downloads exceeded 3 million in just four days. What does all of this mean?
Apple responded rather quickly last year after OS X Lion’s release, claiming 1 million downloads in the first 24 hours. Yet, with Mountain Lion, 3 million downloads in the first four days averages out to 750,000 downloads per day. Granted that's an estimate, but it would actually place Mountain Lion behind Lion based on first day downloads.
Olympics fans asked not to tweet during events
London 2012 has been described as the first true “social media games”, with sports fans tweeting, texting and sending photos and videos live from events. But on Sunday it became clear that all this activity placed a strain on the networks when a deluge of messages sent by fans lining the streets to watch the men’s cycling road race prevented TV commentators from telling how far ahead the leaders were.
The problem, apparently with one so-far unidentified provider, stopped data from the cyclists’ GPS satellite navigation system getting through to the studios, leading to confusion. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was forced to ask enthusiastic tweeters to limit the sending of non-vital messages -- at least until more network capacity could be arranged.
Microsoft debuts Wedge Touch Mouse and Mobile Keyboard for Windows 8
Microsoft's Surface tablet has received praise and only light criticism since its introduction a month ago. The innovative tablet addresses one of the biggest issues that computer professionals have when it comes to touch-based devices: the lack of a physical keyboard.
But Surface is not the only product that Microsoft will be making available to accommodate the launch of much-anticipated Windows 8. The company just announced the availability of four hardware peripherals that have been specifically designed for the next version of Windows.
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