What secrets is your website revealing? FOCA 3 can help you find out
Document metadata can be a great help in organizing files on your own PC. Add the appropriate keywords in a Comments tag, say, and it’ll be much easier to find the file later.
If you intend to share the documents online, though, metadata can be a real menace, leaking all kinds of data: network folders and user names, email addresses, details on the operating systems and software packages you’re using and a whole lot more.
Windows XP is still pretty cool
Twelfth in a series. Here’s a dirty little secret: I’m still using Windows XP.
That’s right. A technology analyst -- independent, mind you; not working for a firm that requires a specific load -- and I’m voluntarily using XP. In fact, I’m writing this article on it. I’ve been using it so long, I almost stopped noticing, and as XP crossed the 10-year anniversary of its official launch this week, I thought some about my own experiences with it.
ARM gets into the server game, goes 64-bit with new ARMv8 architecture
ARM Holdings, the British company behind the popular ARM processor architecture used in more than 15 billion mobile devices, announced this week that the newest version of the ARM architecture will add 64-bit processing for the first time ever.
This new architecture has two main execution states, AArch64 and AArch32. The AArch64 execution state introduces a new instruction set, A64 for 64-bit processing, and AArch32 supports the existing ARM instruction set that is used in all of ARM's previous offerings, including the popular Cortex A9 and Cortex A15 processors being used by chipmakers such as Broadcom, Texas Instruments, Samsung, and Toshiba.
Is PlayBook 3-for-2 deal cheap enough?
Research in Motion is using a little clothing retailer incentive to motivate businesses to buy BlackBerry PlayBook. But if you don't want any, would you buy three? For a limited time, RIM and its retail partners are offering a buy 2-get-1-free special. If that's not enough incentive, they're throwing in free accessories, too, like leather sleeve and HDMI cable. The deal is available through December 31.
RIM sold 500,000 PlayBooks during the launch quarter but only 200,000 the one following. It's safe to assume there's lots of inventory in the channel, and a deal like this is one way to clear the stock rooms. But how good is it really, and is it enough to push you to PlayBook? The latter question is for you to answer in comments. I've got the first here.
Should your small business virtualize?
Virtualization is one of the hottest IT topics today. Everyone's talking about it, but few are really doing it -- and there's a big gulf between enterprise and small business adoption, even though many of the benefits are the same. Small business is one of my favorite technology segments, because of its diversity, unique needs, large size, yet small IT footprint. When working as an analyst during the mid-Noughties I launched JupiterResearch's SMB practice. I've been remiss by not writing more about small business tech at BetaNews.
There is much confusion about what is a small business -- how official statisticians and high-tech vendors segment sizes. Small businesses account for 97 percent of employee firms, according to US government agencies. But that segmentation counts firms with fewer than 500 employees as small business -- large by my measure -- and ignores the enormous number of operations with non-payroll employees. This segment is often overlooked by high-tech vendors, many of which count them as consumers. By the US Census Bureau's reckoning, there are nearly 27.3 million small businesses, but only 5.9 million have payrolls and 3.62 million employ fewer than five people. So there are 21.4 million businesses employing less than 5 people -- that's 78 percent of them.
Android-powered video game consoles: the time is right
Just over one week ago, Google officially debuted Ice Cream Sandwich, the next version of the Android mobile operating system, which for the first time unifies smartphones and mobile tablets under the same operating system.
Android 4.0 adds support for cursor hover events, stylus distance/tilt/orientation, and mouse button events, but the most exciting new HID support was highlighted in a tweet from Google framework engineer Romain Guy last Friday:
HP pulls a Netflix, decides against PC division spin-off
Hewlett-Packard on Thursday announced it will not spin off its Personal Systems group. For the last month, the company has been looking at possible "alternatives" for the PSG -better known as the consumer computer portion of HP that leads the global market- and one of the options the company discussed was turning it into a separate company, akin to what IBM did when it sold off its PC division to Lenovo more than five years ago.
"HP objectively evaluated the strategic, financial and operational impact of spinning off PSG. It’s clear after our analysis that keeping PSG within HP is right for customers and partners, right for shareholders, and right for employees,” said HP's new president and chief executive officer Meg Whitman. “HP is committed to PSG, and together we are stronger.”
Mobile browser compatibility: Test it, or let someone else worry about it
Testing a site for mobile browser compatibility can be a tricky matter. Each of the different mobile platforms has their own built-in browser in addition to downloadable third-party ones, there are the different screen sizes and resolutions, different orientation sensors, and different processor power profiles.
And there's the ever-present problem of plug-in support and support for the new, growing browser technologies like HTML5 and CSS3.
Got Google Apps? Now you can get Google+ too
Nearly four months to the day after Google first unveiled its social network to the masses, the search giant on Thursday opened up Google+ to users of its Google Apps platform. While users of standard Google accounts have been able to sign up for the service without an invite since late September, those registered under a Google Apps account remained logged out.
Google claims that technical issues prevented a faster rollout for Apps customers, but did not specify the exact cause of the delays.
Now you can globally manage Outlook attachments
Use Outlook for a while and it’s all too easy to build up a bulky Inbox, weighed down in particular by all the attachments you’ve received. And while you can delete or save these individually, Outlook doesn’t provide any global way to manage all your email attachments. Which is why you may well need NirSoft’s OutlookAttachView.
The program has more filtering capabilities than we expected. So, for instance, you can choose to view only attachments sent within a particular date range, of a particular size or file type, from a specified group of senders, or to defined email addresses, amongst other options. But if you don’t care about any of that – or you’re just in a hurry -- simply click OK on the opening Scan Options dialog and OutlookAttachView will show you all the attachments for messages stored in the default Outlook profile.
First an outage, now a lawsuit: US, Canadian Blackberry users want compensation
Research in Motion will now need to fight off class action suits in both the United States and Canada, following a four-day outage earlier this month which started overseas but quickly spread worldwide. The outage left some without email, web browsing, and instant messaging for several days.
RIM apologized for the issues and offered free apps and enterprise tech support for its customers' troubles, but that was not enough. The US effort was filed on Wednesday in the US District Court for the Central District of California in Santa Ana, and the Canadian suit in the Quebec Superior Court. Both efforts seek class-action status.
Hate Google? Try Firefox with Bing
In the rush to cover Nokia World and new Windows Phones, I missed something kind of ground quaking yesterday. Microsoft is promoting Firefox with Bing. The default search engine, which users can change, is Google on standard Firefox. Now they can get the browser with Bing as default. Did hell freeze over and I miss the tweet?
Firefox exists today because of Google. People can rabble on about the importance of open-source and raise Firefox as the poster application for the movement's success. Software development isn't free, and running an organization and marketing products require capital. Firefox launched 7 years ago next month, and Google not only has powered search but provided through the bundled service the cash that keeps the organization running. Why on earth, or any planet, then would Mozilla jeopardize that relationship?
Uh-oh iTunes, WinAmp comes to OS X, syncs with Android
WinAmp used to have a huge following back in the days when MP3 was still something of a new format, and the increased popularity of the Mac and Android platforms seems to have brought about something of a resurgence. While Windows users have long enjoyed the player, Mac users have not been so lucky. All this changes with the release of a beta version of the Mac player along with an important update for users of the Android version of the app.
The curiously names WinAmp for Mac Sync Beta not only indicates that the Mac software is currently in beta testing, but also that there is a strong focus on synchronization. While the player can be used to listen to your locally stored music library, it can also be used to keep your iTunes library synchronized as well as synching music with your Android device.
Sony buys Ericsson out of mobile phone joint venture, both companies happy
Sony Corporation's joint venture with Swedish telecommunications leader Ericsson will become the sole property of Sony, the two companies announced on Thursday. Sony will acquire Ericsson's 50 percent stake in the joint venture for approximately 1.05 billion Euro in cash.
This change in ownership will affect quite a few aspects of both companies' businesses. Firstly and perhaps most importantly, Ericsson, which has a long-standing goal of connecting 50 billion devices, can take its focus off of handsets, a technology it views as "first wave connectivity," and concentrate on the areas where it is most powerful: components and infrastructure. This way, it can focus on the future of "networked everything" rather than the past of consumer electronics.
FoxIt Reader 5.1 goes social -- Facebook and Twitter
Foxit Software has updated its free PDF tool, Foxit Reader to version 5.1. This new release adds tools for sharing content from PDF files with Facebook and Twitter, and adds a Read Out Loud feature that uses speech synthesis to read any text embedded into the current PDF file.
Version 5.1 also introduces a new Reading Mode that helps to maximize the reading area via options that help to provide a full-screen view of the current document. The program can be updated through its own updater or downloaded separately and installed over the top of the existing verson.
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