Apple patent lawsuits are hypocritical
I've been fairly critical of Apple's recent patent bullying -- what I call innovation through intimidation/litigation. The Apple Fanclub of bloggers and journalists defend the company's patent and other intellectual property claims as protecting its innovations from copying, particularly by Samsung. But who's copying whom?
As several Betanews commenters recently point out, Apple cofounder, current Chairman and former CEO Steve Jobs admits to the company copying from others. From a mid 1990s interview: "Picasso had a saying, he said: 'Good artists copy, great artists steal'. We have, you know, always, ah, been shameless about stealing great ideas".
Be careful, that PDF might be a Mac Trojan
Well, hello Mac users! The 1 billion Windows users of the world welcome you to the wonderful world of malware. F-Secure has identified a new one, and like Mac Defender, this piece of nastiness borrows from malware already released for Windows.
"We may have come across a Mac malware in the making. Detected as Trojan-Dropper:OSX/Revir.A, the malware disguises as a PDF file to trick user into triggering its payload", F-Secure warned earlier today.
C Spire Wireless: the new underdog 4G mobile network?
A new national wireless operator will open for business on Monday, and its name is C Spire Wireless.
To be fair, it's not really a new company, it's just the new name for Cellular South, the regional network operator whose CEO, Hu Meena, has been a defender of the "little guy" wireless carriers of the U.S. by refusing to share its LTE network with Verizon Wireless, and testifying against the merger of AT&T and T-Mobile.
Blockbuster thinks the problem with Netflix is billing
After taking a serious beating in the DVD rental business by Netflix and Redbox for five years, Blockbuster was driven into bankruptcy and acquired by satellite TV company Dish Network.
But now, Dish and Blockbuster are attempting to gain the favor of disgruntled Netflix subscribers who have faced major changes to their subscription packages as the company spins off its DVD-by-mail rental business.
Smart move: Bing sticks with daily deal aggregator instead of launching its own
Six months ago, Microsoft's search engine Bing launched a mobile daily deals site called (what else) Bing Deals. The idea was that it wasn't a standalone Groupon or LivingSocial competitor, but rather an aggregator of other daily deal sites that partnered with the search engine. Today, Microsoft has launched the desktop version of Bing Deals, and it keeps up what began earlier this year.
Bing Deals aggregates more than 200,000 daily and local deal sites (including Groupon, LivingSocial, Tippr, and retailers like Best Buy, Nordstrom and Zappos) and lets users browse by retailer, location, keyword, or category.
Comodo Dragon: Better browsing security with less bloat
Spending time browsing the Internet can be fulfilling, but it can also be fraught with dangers. Every web browser claims to have a wealth of security options built in, Comodo Dragon goes a little further aiming to not only ensure that life online is as safe as possible, but also that the experience is not dogged by poor performance. Based on a Chromium core, Comodo Dragon is a bloat-free browser that balances speed and security.
The installation of the browser gives you the option of installing a portable version of the application, while the option to import your history, password, cookies and other settings from your current browser means that it makes switching easy.
Get Chrome 15 Beta now!
One week after releasing the first stable build of Google Chrome 14, both Beta and Dev channels have been updated, to versions 15 and 16 respectively. In terms of new features, Google Chrome 15 Beta sees the most radical developments with a redesigned new tab page and the ability to synchronize the Address/Search bar history across multiple installations.
Google Chrome 16 Dev offers one interesting new development in the fact that multi-user support, where users log into a single instance of Chrome with different accounts, has now been enabled by default on Windows and Mac machines.
Samsung Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch first impressions review
Sunday, September 18. Sprint Store, North Jersey.
This fanboy stalked his Sprint Dedicated Care rep for many moons, leading up to this day. What hardship getting here. Samsung announced the Galaxy S II in February, and it started selling everywhere else in the world in April. But not the United States. As if the waiting wasn't enough, 10 days earlier the rep informed me that I would have to go to the local Sprint Store to pre-order the Samsung Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch, but only if I bought a $50 gift card first. Then I would have to return to the store on Sept. 18. Sprint couldn't mail the phone to me. Surely this was a joke.
Trapped in 'Facebook purgatory': new design pushed to accidental testers months ago
When Facebook rolled out its new layout late Tuesday, like past redesigns it was met with a good deal of acrimony from users.
However, for some like Regina Shade, a self-described "Facebook challenged" mother of two, they had been dealing with the reworked popular social networking site for at least three months if not longer.
How to enable Facebook Timeline in 4 steps
Facebook's new Timeline profiles go live on Thursday, September 29, 2011, but you can convert yours now. You just have to pretend you're an app developer (or continue being one if you already are.)
It's a simple four-step process that can be done in a couple of minutes. Here's how you do it:
Léo Apotheker ousted at HP, Meg Whitman in as president, CEO
In what could only be considered a full rebuke of Léo Apotheker's leadership, HP's board of directors announced late Thursday that it had appointed former eBay CEO Meg Whitman as president and CEO of the company, and Ray Lane as executive chairman of the board.
Apotheker would be pushed completely out of the company, including giving up his seat on the board. The news confirms reports that first surfaced on Wednesday from several sources indicating a rumored executive shakeup.
You don't have to wait for Windows 8
Why wait until Windows 8 is released before you sample the look and feel of the next version of Windows? WindowsX has released not one, but two tools that can revamp the Windows interface and give you a fresh new look that matches Windows 8’s look and feel quite closely, right down to Metro-like functionality.
Windows 7 users should take a look at the Windows 8 UX Pack, recently updated to version 3.0, which contains everything you need. Vista, XP and Windows Server users will need a bit more help in the form of the Windows 8 Transformation Pack.
To integrate Netflix into the new Facebook graph, you have to e-mail Congress
At f8, the Facebook developer conference in San Francisco today, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the new Facebook "Timeline" layout, and the deeper, realtime integration of third party apps it will bring. This deeper integration is a part of Facebook's new "Open Graph."
One of the premier Open Graph partners is Sweden-based streaming music service Spotify, which launched in the United States just two months ago. Using the new open graph, the music that Spotify users are listening to is posted live to their Facebook feed, and their friends can click that post and join into the listening session live.
Verizon CEO gives blessing to AT&T T-Mobile merger
AT&T and Deutsche Telekom are busy scrambling to save their $39 billion dollar merger, assembling a top-tier legal team and getting support from an unlikely ally: Verizon Wireless.
Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam publicly voiced his support for AT&T's plans, although the company planned to "stay on the sidelines" while the Justice Department and AT&T negotiate a settlement. If regulators cannot provide the carriers with adequate spectrum to operate in a timely fashion, then these mergers must be permitted to occur, he argued.
Facebook completely redesigns layout with 'Timeline'
If the population of Facebook users was outraged at the site's new layout unveiled yesterday, they're going to completely lose it over Timeline, the new Facebook experience that turns a user's profile into a literal life history timeline. In short, Facebook combined its social feed with the plugin-supported self-publishing of WordPress and magazine-style readability of Flipboard.
Instead of simply piling new Facebook information on top of the page, and hiding all the previous information, everything you do becomes a historical item that can be curated and published as your own personal story.
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