Latest Technology News

As the PSN outage enters its eighth day, some online gamers surely are asking "What now? What can I do?" You've spent more than a week -- yes, it does feel like years -- in front of the TV looking at the PSN offline message and hoping the network will magically come back up. Sorry, bud, but the only magic is in the game.

I present some things you can do while waiting for PlayStation Network to come back up -- and perhaps buckle under the load of 77 million subscribers trying to change their passwords all at the same time. To our readers, the list is but a start. Please offer your own activities in comments. Let's have some real fun with this. Hey, adding to this list is one of the things to do while waiting for PSN. In no particular order of importance:

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CyberLink's PowerDVD has long been many people's DVD and Blu-ray player of choice. But that's no longer enough for CyberLink, which boasts that PowerDVD 11 "is the world's leading universal media player for the PC", so powerful that it can "play any media format, from any source." Universal media player? Any media format? Big claims, then, but has CyberLink delivered? We took PowerDVD 11 for a spin in an effort to find out.

The interface hasn't changed too much, with simple tabs allowing you to play particular content types. And the core DVD and Blu-ray functionality is also similar to PowerDVD 10, though there are a few useful additions dotted throughout the package. The program doesn't only play DVDs, Blu-ray and Blu-ray 3D discs, for instance: it can now also handle recorded 3D TV.

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Earlier this week, Google updated its popular web browser Chrome to version 11. The latest stable release, which sports a new "flattened" version of the program icon, has one major headline feature: support for text-to-speech in supported web pages. This new feature, designed for those who have difficulty using keyboards, is based on HTML5 technology -- and works on web pages where a microphone icon has been embedded into a text or form field. It currently only supports English as a language.

The feature works by the user clicking the microphone icon before speaking into their mic. Chrome then converts this into text and pastes it into the field. Supported websites are currently thin on the ground, but it can be tested at HTML Rocks or by selecting English as the "From" language at Google Translate.

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Mobile devices running iOS generated $43.79 billion for Apple during calendar 2010, or about 57 percent of revenues. But it is the rise in overall revenue and net profit that is most significant, as seen from the chart above. Perhaps more surprising, Apple's calendar first quarter 2011 net profit was just slightly less than that of the holiday quarter, when iOS device sales were even stronger.

The revenue curve from Q1 to Q4 2010 is simply stunning. Apple revenue nearly doubled, as did its net profit -- from $13.5 billion to $26.7 billion and $3.1 billion to $6 billion, respectively. In April 2010, Apple launched iPad, which generated about $10 billion in revenue during 2010. Without iPad, Apple would have generated only $66.28 billion last year -- still impressive.

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In the 24 hours since Sony informed the world that PSN had been hacked, customers are finally getting useful information about the hack and risk to them. Clearly, Sony is trying to quell fears about the privacy risk posed to as many as 77 million subscribers.

Today's update was a Q&A, labeled #1, so more may be coming. The post responds, in part, to questions PlayStation Network subscribers asked in comments to yesterday's shocking post admitting hackers had stolen massive amounts of data -- account names and passwords, addresses and phone numbers, birth dates and security questions. Exactly how did the hackers get so much information?

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That's not just PCs but servers, too.

Today Gartner offered a refreshing perspective on operating systems, carving up the market by revenue share rather than units. By that measure, Windows combined PC and server OS share was 78.6 percent in 2010, up 8 percent year over year. While Windows' lead is commanding, Mac OS is growing faster, up 15.8 percent to $520 million in revenue. But the king of growth is Oracle, which share rose 7,683 percent from $10 million to $780 million year over year. Oracle catapulted from ninth to fourth place and ahead of fifth-ranked Apple, mainly from its April 2009 Sun Microsystems acquisition and Solaris with it.

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Bids are expected to be received for social networking site MySpace by the end of the week, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. News Corp, which acquired the site in 2005 for $580 million, is said to be seeking bids of at least $100 million for the site.

At least a half-dozen companies are said to be considering bids, including several equity firms and Criterion Capital Partners LLC, owners of social networking site Bebo. The structures of the deals are not known although it is said that some include News Corp retaining a small stake.

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A huge percentage of home computer users have a small network setup, and the same is certainly true for many small businesses. Setting up a network means that it is possible to share files and resources such as an Internet connection between multiple computers, but it is vitally important to keep an eye on how bandwidth is being used to ensure the best possible performance and to eliminate bottlenecks. Rubbernet is a network monitoring tool that enables you to do just that with your Mac.

The app can be used in a variety of ways, but at its most basic it can be used to monitor which applications are making use of your network connection. This can be useful when it comes to analyzing network performance, but also acts as a useful security tool as you will be able to see the activity of unknown applications.

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Paragon's Hard Disk Manager Professional has long been one of the most comprehensive collection of hard drive tools around. The new version 11 extends even further, though, making it straightforward to manage even more types of drives.

Plug one of the new 3TB drives into an XP system, for instance, and normally you'd find you can only use the first 2.2TB. Hard Disk Manager 11 Professional includes a GPT Loader, though, that will give you complete access to the full capacity of the drive. The program can now work with Apple HFS+ formatted partitions, too, allowing you to create, format and resize them to suit your needs (and you get read-only access from Windows systems, too).

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Preventing what would have been a shutdown of the service, Yahoo said Wednesday that it had sold popular social bookmarking site Delicious to YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. The two entrepreneurs are returning to tech under their new venture called AVOS, based out of San Mateo, Calif.

Yahoo acquired Delicious in 2005, looking to integrate the service's social aspects into its own web offerings. However, amid increasing competition the company overall began to struggle, and last December Yahoo undertook a major restructuring, meaning the shuttering of several acquired brands.

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CheckPoint Software has introduced a new member of its ZoneAlarm product family. ZoneAlarm SocialGuard has a narrow focus: its sole aim is to monitor children's Facebook accounts in order to alert parents to suspicious activities such as cyberbullying, Internet grooming and inappropriate content.

SocialGuard works alongside existing security software, including ZoneAlarm's own free firewall software, to provide real-time alerts should potentially dangerous activity be detected on up to five monitored Facebook accounts. The parent can then review the alert and take whatever action he or she deems to be appropriate.

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That's the question the company is trying to answer "No" today, with a FAQ presented in its entirety below. With top-10 lists all the rage, Apple presents 10 questions and answers about reported iPhone tracking. Is Apple watching you? Do you even care?

The controversy started last week, when researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden uncovered a so-called hidden data file with tracking information on iPhone. The discovery set off a row of controversy about Android and Windows Phone possibly tracking users, too. I know that Nexus S tracks, at least by default. Within a day of activating the device last December, I received email warning: "Google Latitude is running on your mobile device and reporting your location." Gee, thanks, Google.

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Wouldn't it be funny if millions of people held back buying iPhone 4 because they wanted white? To many of Betanews' geekiest readers, that question is outrageous in the asking -- let alone answering it. But high tech is as much about fashion, what it says about you, as utility. Otherwise, why are there products like Apple MacBook Air or Samsung Series 9 notebooks?

Look at Bluetooth earpieces or men's watches, for example, where design makes a statement about you. How many men choose Invicta watches for their enormous size and bold, tough guy appearance? Automobiles have long been the ultimate in design statement. Then there is what Apple has done with colors, for the iPod line and, more recently, iPad Smart Covers. Design matters.

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On the first of July, it is going to take a little bit more cash to become Microsoft Certified Professional in specific areas.

According to an announcement from Microsoft, the retail price of mid-range Microsoft Certification exams will increase worldwide. The exams slated for a price increase are:
Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS), Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP), Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD), Microsoft Certified Desktop Support Technician (MCDST), Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator (MCSA), Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE), Microsoft Certified Application Developer (MCAD), Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD),
and Microsoft Certified Database Administrator (MCDBA).

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For as many as 77 million PlayStation subscribers, Sony delivered grim news today: Not only is PlayStation Network still down, but hackers obtained users' personal information, including logins and passwords. Credit card numbers and expiration dates "may have been obtained." That "may have" is a polite way of saying probably did.

Not only has Sony taken six days to come clean but PSN is still down, so subscribers can't log in to change their compromised information. That's what I wanted to do right away, if for no other reason than a sense of control and security. That Sony can't, or won't, bring back PSN says something extraordinary about the potential scope of the breach.

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