Use ImDisk to mount ISO images as virtual discs
One of the plus points of Windows 8 is that it can natively mount an ISO image as a virtual disk, allowing you to browse it without requiring a physical disc. If you’d like to have that ability right now, though, there’s no need to wait -- the free ImDisk provides capable ISO handling and a whole lot more.
If you’d like to take a closer look at an ISO file, for instance, then right-click it, select “Mount as ImDisk Virtual Drive” > OK, and in a few seconds the image will be available within Explorer as a new virtual drive. (The program supports NRG images, too.)
What will it take to make Linux popular?
In a recent interview Linus Torvalds, the mastermind behind the Linux kernel, said that the operating system is not as popular as Windows on consumer PCs because it doesn’t come preinstalled. Manufacturers sell the computers they make with an operating system on board, which most of the time is Windows. Why can’t it be Linux instead?
According to Net Applications, in 2011, sales estimates have Linux at roughly 1.5 percent usage share on desktop and laptop computers. Windows on the other hand was evaluated at 92 percent in the same estimate. The discrepancy in sales points out few of the issues that Linux has to overcome in order to reach a broader market adoption, but it can also provide a solution.
Local Website Archive easily saves the pages you need most
When carrying out research online you may often find important pages that you’d like to save, and of course you might do this by simply clicking File > Save from your browser. The results can be a little messy, though, with files and folders scattered everywhere, and reviewing the pages later might be difficult.
Local Website Archive tries to help by storing the pages for you. There’s no need to worry about file names or folders -- the program can handle all of that -- and when you’re done you’ll have a neatly presented archive of pages, which is far easier to browse and search.
Google seeks to save 3,000+ languages from extinction
English, Spanish, French, German, Mandarin… How many different languages can you name? At a guess, probably no more than about twenty, which sounds bad when you consider there are an estimated 7,000 languages being spoken every day somewhere on our planet. The vast majority of these are, of course, virtually unknown, and used by a very small portion of the world’s population.
In fact, according to National Geographic, the 3,500 smallest languages are spoken by just 8.25 million people, and the tiniest of these native tongues are teetering on the brink of being silenced forever. It’s believed that one language dies every 14 days -- as its speakers switch to more common alternatives -- and nearly half of the world’s languages are expected to have been wiped out within a century.
Stupid IT mistakes make AWS outages even worse
The massive outage that struck Amazon Web Services last week proved the cloud service is becoming an increasingly vital part of the IT infrastructure of many companies. For better or worse AWS is becoming a standard in the cloud, and its own fortunes are tied to that of some of the biggest web services out there.
Quora and Pinterest are just two services that rely on AWS in part or in full. When Amazon's cloud goes down, these sites will too.
AutoCAD worm is serious example of suspected industrial espionage
The new, targeted, high-tech, military grade malicious code such as Stuxnet, Duqu and Flamer dominates security news. So imagine our surprise when an AutoCAD worm, written in AutoLISP, the scripting language that AutoCAD uses, suddenly showed a big spike in one country on ESET’s LiveGrid two months ago, and this country is Peru.
We have seen other small number of infections of ACAD/Medre.A in other countries, but they are all in regions that are near Peru or have a large Spanish speaking contingent. The odd one out in the infection table would be the People’s Republic of China, but not quite so weird when we started to analyze the worm based on this sudden spike. More about China will follow later.
Tumblr 3 for iOS catches up to Android counterpart, and then some
There was nothing really wrong with Tumblr’s previous iOS app. It offered all the features you’d expect, such as the ability to access your dashboard, create a post, manage multiple blogs and view and reply to messages. The interface was straightforward, intuitive and unmistakably Tumblr.
Version 3.0, however, is just so much better in every way. It’s been rebuilt from the ground up, so is faster, sleeker, easier to use and more in line with its Android counterpart, which itself was updated a couple of months ago.
MailWasher 2012 Free cleans up the spam
FireTrust has today revealed MailWasher 2012 Free, a new version of its popular spam filter. The latest release will provide all the features of the full commercial MailWasher Pro edition for its first 10 days of use, but after that introduces four main restrictions.
There’s no Recycle Bin, which means you can’t browse or restore deleted emails. Preview options are limited, so it may be more difficult to manually determine whether a particular message is spam. Technical support is unsurprisingly reserved for paying customers. And, probably most crucially, the program will be limited to checking 1 email address only, perhaps a deal-breaker for many people.
You can hack Windows 8 Metro
The Metro user interface is without doubt the most controversial feature of Microsoft's upcoming operating system Windows 8. When you dive deeper into the criticism that Metro faces, you notice that one argument stands out among the majority of critics: Metro is for tablets and touch-devices and not the desktop.
While it is possible to use Metro with a mouse and keyboard, its big buttons and controls, like the Charms menu and swiping motions, do cater to an audience that uses touch-devices. When you look closer, you will also notice that Metro does not really offer anything that desktop users can't do on the PC or on the Internet as well, oftentimes even better.
Hometalk relaunches: one part Pinterest, one part Angie's List
Hometalk, a year-old home improvement-themed social network, underwent a total redesign and re-launched on Thursday in hopes of making its content easier to access, and to keep its roughly 100,000 members stuck to the site longer.
The site is designed for homeowners to share pictures, videos, ideas, and conversations about general design and repair themes, including (but not limited to) topics like flooring, gardening, remodeling, painting, and more. This is done in very much the traditional social networking fashion, with user profiles building up networks of friends/followers, and sharing posts based heavily upon photographs. With this redesign, Hometalk has clearly taken note of Pinterest's success, and it includes a new feature called, simply, "Saving." With this feature, users can save any post or photo from other users on a "Virtual Clipboard," similar in both name and design to Pinterest's "Virtual Pinboard."
Microsoft Surface is all style and no substance at all
Microsoft’s Hollywood announcement Monday of its two Surface tablet computers was a tactical triumph but had no strategic value for the world’s largest software company because the event left too many questions unanswered. If I were to guess what was on Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s mind it was simply to beat next week’s expected announcement of a Google branded tablet running Android. Microsoft, already playing catch-up to Apple’s iPad, does not want to be seen as following Google, too. So they held an event that was all style and no substance at all.
This is not to say that Microsoft shouldn’t make a tablet and couldn’t make a good one, but this particular event proved almost nothing.
Microsoft rolls out SmartGlass SDK to first crop of devs
Microsoft on Thursday released the Xbox SmartGlass Software Development Kit (SDK) to partners that have agreements to develop Xbox games and entertainment applications for the Xbox 360.
The device-agnostic SmartGlass application was first revealed at the Electronic Entertainment Expo earlier in June, showing how users will eventually be able to pair their tablet or smartphone with their Xbox 360 for enhanced content consumption and gaming. Now that Microsoft's Surface and Windows Phone 8 initiatives have been revealed, the SmartGlass project has begun to take clearer shape.
Keep your hard drive in tip-top shape with Eassos PartitionGuru Free
Most free recovery tools focus on undeleting files only. As its name suggests, though, Eassos PartitionGuru Free goes a little further: the program can recover anything from individual files to entire partitions, and it has a few other useful features thrown in, too.
That’s the theory, at least. In practice the free edition of the program is a little restricted, and can’t recover data on USB keys, GPT disks, or regular drives which don’t use 512-byte sectors. If that’s not going to affect you, though, PartitionGuru does otherwise have some interesting functionality which you might find very useful.
Windows users, get a Firefox Australis sneak peak
It’s been public knowledge for a while now that Mozilla intends to provide a uniform interface for Firefox across all platforms. The aim of the Australis project is to ensure that the browser looks and feels the same just about everywhere (as much as possible, anyway), and you can read more at MozillaWiki.
This is no longer just theory, though. Jared Wein, a Software Engineer at Mozilla, has written a blog post with an image of the new Australis design (or the new curvy tab shape, anyway), which he says aims to bring “more customizability in a cleaner and fresher user interface”. And if that’s not enough, he’s also created a test Firefox 16.01 build so that you can view it for yourself.
How does Windows Phone 8 affect you?
Something at Microsoft has changed, and it's rather startling. The company so long risk-adverse takes some really big ones -- with Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Surface tablets high among them. Windows 8 radically changes the user interface, which already irks some long-time customers, particularly in businesses. Windows Phone 8 is incompatible with every WP handset ever sold, even two-and-a-half-month old HTC Titan II or Nokia Lumia 900. Surface competes with OEM partners, and some already complain Microsoft blind-sided them. This isn't your father's Microsoft, or elder sibling's.
For years, Microsoft sought to preserve the status quo, and still does. But no longer is CEO Steve Ballmer and his top guns willing to stand still while the market moves forward. IBM chose status quo during the computing-era transition from mainframe to PC -- cater to existing customers and preserve existing revenue streams. For years, Microsoft followed similar course during the early transition from the PC to the cloud-connected device era. No longer. Microsoft takes big risks to preserve its computing relevance, and they'll either sink the company or preserve its place in the new world order. The question: How does it all affect you?
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