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That's again my reaction to startling US mobile numbers that Nielsen released today. Like comScore, Nielsen shows dramatic -- and I mean absolutely stunning -- changes in Android and iPhone adoption since the 4S shipped. Android share, as measured in smartphone operating systems among new purchasers, plummeted from 61.6 percent in October to 46.9 percent in December. Meanwhile, iPhone rose from 25.1 percent share to 44.5 percent. Distribution -- not release of iPhone 4S -- is reason, or so I say.

Nielsen, naturally sees something else: "The high-profile launch of Apple’s iPhone 4S in the Fall had an enormous impact on the proportion of smartphone owners who chose an Apple iPhone" -- that would be for November and December. But that simplistic analysis overlooks mitigating factors. Among the most important -- 43 percent of new buyers chose older iPhones 4 or 3GS.

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If you’d like to remotely restart or shut down a system on your network then Windows already provides some basic assistance. A command like shutdown /s /m \\hostname, say, will try to close down the named computer, and you can tweak precisely how this will work in many different ways (enter shutdown /? at a command line for the full list).

Command line tools aren’t always the most convenient way to manage your network, though. So if you’d like an easier way to monitor running systems, remotely restart or shut them down whenever you like, and wake them up as well, then you’ll probably prefer the small but surprisingly powerful RemoteRebootX.

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Last week I chimed: "Only Windows 8 can save the PC market now". Weak consumer computer sales forebode market shifts ahead, but so do those in the enterprise. An IDG Connect study reveals just how much: IT and business decision makers are augmenting or replacing PCs with iPads at an alarming rate.

"Fully 51 percent of IT and business decision-makers say they always use their iPad at work", according to the report -- and, of course, that's the number who actually own the tablet. Sixteen percent have replaced their laptop with an iPad and 54 percent supplement it. Remember, these numbers are for people responsible for corporate computing. As the wind shifts in their sails -- or should that be sales -- so does it eventually across the computing infrastructure. The data suggests that iPads are significantly starting to cannibalize PC sales -- and not just among consumers -- and it's consistent with recent global PC buying trends.

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When it comes to sharing files, there are a number of options available to you. If you want to share files with someone nearby, it may make sense to pop them on a USB drive and physically deliver them. For smaller files it is possible to make use of email, but things get trickier when larger files are involved. You could go as far as uploading files to your own web space or even setting up your own FTP server, but this is something that few people would want to go to these lengths. Share is a free tool that enables you to overcome these problems and share files of any size.

Coming from BitTorrent, it should come as no surprise to learn how Share works. It is essentially a personal torrent client that makes it possible to allow people of your choice to connect to your computer and access the files you have chosen to share; this is a great example of personal P2P. having created an account, files can be shared by using nothing more than drag and drop, and all you need to do is to select who you would like to share them with.

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Pay a visit to HP’s download pages and for the most part you know exactly what you’re going to get: drivers, manuals and all the usual installation software you’d expect from the company’s wide range of products.

Look a little closer, though, and you’ll also find one or two more generally interesting freebies. And so HP’s Web Security Application Group, for instance, has produced a tool called SwfScan, which can both decompile SWF applets and analyze them for security vulnerabilities.

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SOPA blackout day has arrived, and Wikipedia is going farther than the planned 12-hour protest -- from 8 am to 8 pm. The community encyclopedia is going down for twice as long. Today, we'll all learn just how important Wikipedia is to the Internet community. I find it a valuable resource as a journalist. Will you miss it?

Still, there is a nugget of information to be had from Wikipedia: About why the protest. Like many other sites today, the open encyclopedia stands against two pieces of legislation here in the United States: PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), introduced by senators in May, and October bill Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), introduced in the House. A delayed House vote, from December, was scheduled for today but postponed following last week's statement from the White House. SOPA is weakened but not done yet. SOPA Strike provides an excellent timeline for both bills. Senate vote is still scheduled for January 24.

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At CES 2012, we took a quick look at Samsung's booth displaying the Galaxy Note as a tool useful to artists and musicians, and I talked about the relatively small number of killer music applications for the Android platform.

Fortunately the band performing in Samsung's booth, Body Language, was willing to show us exactly how they incorporate Android devices into their live music setup, and how we can do the same.

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The attackers behind the Koobface worm are not doing much to cover their tracks, say security researchers with Facebook and several security firms. Hackers are living a comfortable life in St. Petersburg, Russia, and have been posting freely to social networking sites such as Facebook and Foursquare.

Facebook and law enforcement have reportedly known their identities for several years. At least one of the members of the gang has repeatedly broadcast the location of the group's offices via Foursquare, including pictures of members at work -- presumably spreading Koobface around the world.

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Yahoo co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang has tendered his resignation from all of his positions at Yahoo, including his spot on the Board of Directors of Yahoo USA and Japan, and his position within Alibaba.

In a letter to the board, Yang said, "My time at Yahoo!, from its founding to the present, has encompassed some of the most exciting and rewarding experiences of my life. However, the time has come for me to pursue other interests outside of Yahoo! As I leave the company I co-founded nearly 17 years ago, I am enthusiastic about the appointment of Scott Thompson as Chief Executive Officer and his ability, along with the entire Yahoo! leadership team, to guide Yahoo! into an exciting and successful future."

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Another major breach is in the headlines. Zappos, an online shoe and apparel retailer owned by Amazon, disclosed Sunday night that more than 24 million of its customer accounts had been compromised. Hackers accessed customer names, email addresses, phone numbers, the last four digits of credit card numbers and cryptographically scrambled passwords.

To its credit, Zappos moved quickly, resetting the passwords for all the affected accounts. But it was cold comfort for those who may still be in danger of having their data exposed if they used the same or similar credentials on other websites. This concern prompted Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh to warn customers of possible phishing scam exposures in an email to affected customers. It’s another reminder of the sad state of security today.

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Once you’ve finished working with a USB flash drive then it’s easy just to unplug it right away, but of course that’s usually not a good idea. If the Windows cache contains changes that haven’t yet been written to the drive then removing it may result in lost data, so it’s always best to eject the drive first.

And if you find the standard Windows eject option isn’t as easy as you’d like, then there are plenty of capable alternatives around. RemoveDrive, for instance, which we wrote about back in November, makes it easy to eject drives from a shortcut or a custom script. But ProEject takes the idea considerably further.

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Apple is holding an education-themed event this week, and the usual gamut of unnamed sources and rumor-mongers have come to the consensus that the event will focus on Apple's plans to enter the e-textbook business, and possibly unveil a new interactive e-book publishing platform.

This rumor springs from the best-selling biography of late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, in which Jobs' biographer Walter Isaacson said textbooks were "the next business [Jobs] wanted to transform," and that the company had already had several series of meetings about making Apple e-textbooks a reality.

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ISO images have been a popular means of distributing software for a very long time, so it was good to see Windows 7 finally introduce a tool to burn them to disc.

It’ll probably be Windows 10 before we get to see the operating system provide all the ISO handling features you’re likely to need, though, so if you regularly need to work with disc images then a quicker solution might be to download the ISO ToolKit.

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Jan. 18, 2012 is designated SOPA blackout day, with prominent websites planning to go dark in protest of two bills working through Congress -- Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). If you've got a big school project due Thursday and plan on using Wikipedia, get your research done today. The community-based encyclopedia plans to go dark tomorrow, and it's not alone.

The proposed legislation has generated gigabytes of negative responses, which included a Go Daddy boycott for supporting SOPA (since retracted) and culminates in tomorrow's blackout. Two months ago, I posed poll: "US Congress is considering two new copyright bills: PROTECT IP and Stop Online Piracy Act. Do you support them?" More than 3,500 responses later, 95 percent answered "No". You're not alone.

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You have undoubtedly noticed that an ever-increasing amount of the time you spend using your computer is online. The same is true of your phone, and when you’re out and about it is quite usual to use dedicated apps to access services such as Facebook and Twitter. But when using a desktop or laptop, the vast majority of people will head straight to the website of various online services. Thanks to Pokki this may change.

Pokki is a platform for a series of applications that can then be used to transform a range of websites and online services into desktop apps. The value of being able to access the Internet through the desktop rather than a browser is something that has been recognized in the past -- even Microsoft noticed the potential early on with its Active Desktop component in older versions of Windows. Pokki is somewhat more advanced than this and other similar options that are available, offering you a series of specially designed apps, each of which have been built from the ground up with a particular web service in mind.

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