Archive for the ‘Featured’ Category

If you missed it: Evidently, a bunch of folks, largely in Europe, got tricked by an email offering free Microsoft points by going to a fake website and disclosing their credit card information. The cost to each person is estimated to be between $150 and $400. So, how can people be so stupid? Actually, what you should be asking is: How can you make sure you don’t make the same embarrassing mistake?

Google added an incremental garbage collector, which improves the memory performance of the browser and promises better “interactive performance” with web apps and HTML5 games. According to Google, garbage collection pause times previously depended on the amount of memory used. The result was an effect that Google describes as “hiccuping”. The new garbage collector in [...]

Photos that look just as good after 10 years as they did on the day they were taken is a circumstance we are used to in times of digital photography. However, historically, it is questionable at best and plain incorrect in most cases. Environmental influences degrade the quality of your printed picture over time. IBM believes that digital images should follow suit and has filed a patent for an automatically aging file system.

The Wikimedia Foundation announced that the Brin Wojcicki Foundation, launched by Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his wife, 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki, have given half a million dollars to the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia.

Neelie Kroes, vice president of the European Commission, sharply criticized the current copyright system as counter productive and noted that it may not be achieving the goal of benefiting content creators.

Google’s Aura hardware accelerated window manager remains a mystery to the outside world, but there is now a video that gives a first impression of a feature in Aura: Translucent windows.

Review - As Christmas approaches, it appears that more folks are considering a tablet as a gift for a spouse or for their kids and I am frequently asked which tablet I would recommend. The trend appears to be pretty much determined by price, not product: If I can spend $500 or more, the intent clearly is to get an iPad 2 and if it is less than $500, the target price appears to be $200 and the question is: Kindle Fire or something else? However, if it is a non-iPad 2 device, you may want to aim a bit higher and get a more enjoyable device. Example: Acer’s Iconia 501 4G, which is the cheapest way to get the full Android experience in a tablet. Here is what you can expect.

How trivial is the operation of a data center today? Does the data center itself, in its common form, still provide room for patents? Would the supply of electricity if it came from a wind turbine that is connected to the data center, in its simplest form, qualify for a patent? Apparently so.

Mozilla released the first native UI builds for Firefox Mobile on its Nightly channel. Nightly users will get the update next Tuesday, but the current browser version is far from being usable on some Android devices.

It is not much more than a rumor, but we believe there is some credibility that PC makers may not be willing to keep investing in a market that may have huge volumes but not deliver any profits. Will the tablet market remain an iPad market and simply birth additional, new Kindle and Nook markets?

I’ve been watching electric cars for some time and almost fell in love with a Tesla, but concluded it made little sense, a few months ago. Recently, I had a chance to revisit this topic by living through the experiences of a friend who had bought an electric car. I still don’t think they are ready for prime time.

In the first half of November, Chrome continued to gain market share, while Firefox’ losses accelerate again. Microsoft’s marketing campaign to support Internet Explorer has shown some effect, but is weakening again. To stay relevant, Mozilla will now have to deliver new features such as bookmark migration, silent updates, the Android tablet UI, the home tab app and the new tab page on time.