TECHNOLOGY

Google's Chrome OS laptop saved my butt

By Joe Wilcox, BetanewsMy March started off badly today. When I was a school kid in Maine, teachers said that if March roared in like a lion, meaning snowy stormy, it would go out like a lamb -- and vice versa. I got the storm in a faulty Snow Leopard rather than the Lion. This morning my 11.6-inch MacBook Air crashed and wouldn't reboot. If not for moving my computing life to the cloud, I would h...

Software and content in the Arab world: Moving beyond infancy

By Tim Conneally, BetanewsIn the late 90's, India, Israel, and Ireland (often called the "three i's") grew from having unremarkable software industries into major software exporting nations. According to the Taxonomy of New Software exporting Nations by Erran Carmel in 2003, they went from "infant" software exporting nations to almost top-tier major exporters in a relatively short time, a rare occ...
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Google: Gmail access restored soon to all affected

By Ed Oswald, BetanewsGoogle said late Monday that it would have e-mail access restored to those who found themselves locked out of their accounts due to a glitch in a storage update applied to Gmail servers on Sunday. The company noticed the update was malfunctioning and pulled it before it could cause additional trouble.As opposed to the .08% of all Gmail users affected, Google revised that numb...

Do you still own iPad?

By Joe Wilcox, BetanewsThe question is meant for people who bought or received the original iPad since its release in April 2010. See, I keep meeting people who gave up iPad -- and not because they're preparing to buy its successor, which geekdom expects will be announced tomorrow. I consistently hear giver-uppers say they no longer used Apple's tablet much, or at all.I sold my iPad in December, m...

Glorylogic releases ISO Workshop

By Nick PeersIf you want to back up a CD, DVD or Blu-ray disc, then the ISO file offers the opportunity to take advantage of all that spare capacity on your backup drive, using that as a storage medium for your backed up discs. ISO files are exact images of discs, which also comes in handy when you, or someone else, wants to distribute a CD without incurring the costs of burning a disc and posting...

How do you repair errors in your QuickBooks data file?

By Larry SeltzerIf you've got a small business odds are very high that you use Intuit's QuickBooks for your accounting. You may have figured out by now that things go wrong with QuickBooks now and then. On occasion, they go wrong to the point of corrupting your database.You might not be able to open your company file. Perhaps QuickBooks says it's "Not a QuickBooks data file or is damaged", perhaps...

HP announces its first non-print inkjet solution for medical research

By Tim Conneally, BetanewsHP today announced a new direct digital dispensing design for medical research that utilizes inkjet printheads to accurately apportion tiny doses of drugs.In the fields of medicine and biotechnology, the process of drug discovery is long, costly, difficult, and sometimes wasteful. We often hear it said that each new drug costs about $1.3 billion to develop. HP today said ...

Apple exec Tim Cook seems to confirm 'iPhone nano'

By Ed Oswald, BetanewsApple seems to be set to release a cheaper iPhone after the company's executives made some uncharacteristically frank comments during an analyst meeting with Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi. Chief operating officer Tim Cook appears to have all but confirmed a cheaper iPhone is in the works.Cook told Sacconaghi that the Cupertino company wants its iPhone to not be j...

Gmail outage locks some users out of e-mail

By Ed Oswald, BetanewsGoogle was still working to restore access to its Gmail e-mail service to a handful of customers on Monday, a day after an outage prevented a few users from accessing their e-mails. A message posted to the Google Apps status page at 10:40pm Eastern Sunday said engineers were "working to restore full access," and full access would be restored in the "near future."No update had...

Windows Intune, Microsoft's new cloud solution, launches March 23

By Tim Conneally, BetanewsMicrosoft on Monday announced that its new cloud PC management solution, Windows Intune, will be launched in its first complete RTM build on March 23 at the Microsoft Management Summit, and will be commercially available in more than 35 countries thereafter.Windows Intune is a cloud-based desktop management solution which lets IT techs manage remote systems through their ...

Move over iPad, Kindle is coming to an AT&T store near you

By Joe Wilcox, BetanewsToday, AT&T announced that, starting March 6, it will carry Amazon's Kindle reader in its retail stores nationwide. Timing is interesting, given iPad 2's imminent launch and Apple App Store subscription changes that could compel Amazon to curtail or even stop distribution of Kindle software for iOS devices. Buyers considering iPad in AT&T stores will now have option of the l...

Now in beta: OS X backdoor Trojan

By Tim Conneally, BetanewsSecurity researchers at Sophos Labs last week discovered a new, "still in beta" backdoor Trojan targeting Mac OS. The Trojan, identified as BlackHoleRAT, is a variant of the free "remote administration tool" darkComet RAT for Windows, and gives the administrator the ability to place text files on the desktop, send restart, shutdown or sleep commands, to run shell commands...

Third party beats Microsoft to the punch, releases free SDK for Kinect

By Tim Conneally, BetanewsMicrosoft's Craig Mundie and Don Mattrick recently announced that the company would be releasing a non-commercial SDK for its Kinect 3D motion controller sometime this spring. Today, just seven days later, Belgian 3D interface company SoftKinetic has launched its free SDK for all depth-sensing cameras, including Microsoft's Kinect."We want to expand the community of devel...

Apple needs Jony Ive more than it does Steve Jobs

By Joe Wilcox, BetanewsThere has been lots of recent speculation about whether Apple can go on without its CEO should he not return from medical leave. Steve Jobs may be visionary and iconic, but Jony Ive's value simply can't be overstated. Apple's vice president of industrial design has influenced most of the major hardware product designs since joining the company in 1996. I have long felt that ...

Verizon's iPhone 4 public relations damage control says it all

By Joe Wilcox, BetanewsInitial sales didn't meet expectations, and the company is stalling until its next earnings report -- perhaps hoping sales wil surge meanwhile. Moreover, if Verizon Wireless sold 60 percent of initial iPhone sales online, as the CEO claims, the other 40 percent leads to a surprisingly small number.On February 14, I asked: "Say, whatever happened to that 1 million Verizon iPh...

Servers made huge rebound in 2010, but sales will be slower this year

By Joe Wilcox, BetanewsPerhaps Apple chose the wrong time to get out of the server market. The company stopped selling Xserve at the end of January. Now the 2010 server numbers are in, and they're looking pretty good. Server shipments grew 16.8 percent during 2010 and revenue by 13.2 percent, year over year, according to Gartner. It was a remarkable turnaround compared to 2009, when shipments and ...

Streaming video largely lacks accessibility for the deaf; Netflix is working on it

By Tim Conneally, BetanewsThe Web as a whole tends to favor those individuals with their vision intact. There are a couple of areas of the Web that have benefitted the visually impaired: Web radio and podcasting services, for example, are generally free sources of lots of information, and many of the most popular news sites do daily or weekly audio recaps of their featured written content. Voice o...

Consumer Reports claims Verizon iPhone has antenna issues, too

By Ed Oswald, BetanewsAs if the press frenzy surrounding the antenna problems with the AT&T iPhone 4 last year was not enough, Consumer Reports has just added some more fuel to the fire. The publication claims that in its own internal tests of the Verizon model, the same exact attenuation issues are occurring.Bloggers and journalists labeled it a whole bunch of amusing and comical names: from the ...

Google's war on content farms begins with algorithm update

By Ed Oswald, BetanewsGoogle took a big step Thursday night towards dealing with the issue of content farms clogging results, changing its algorithms to weed out low-quality sites. The company said the changes would "noticeably impact" 11.8 percent of all queries, and could affect the rankings for a large number of websites, the company warned."We can't make a major improvement without affecting r...

MySpace's relative stability in mobile usage attracts potential buyers

By Tim Conneally, BetanewsIn the first month of 2011, Myspace CEO Mike Jones confirmed that News Corp was looking to spin off or sell his social media and entertainment site. According to reports on Friday, more than 20 parties have already expressed interest in MySpace.Silicon Alley Insider on Thursday posted a chart concisely titled "The Utter Collapse of MySpace," which showed how the social-ne...

Xoom Corp. sues Motorola for obvious reasons

By Tim Conneally, BetanewsWe're pretty confident you know what Xoom is by now. Stories we've run about the upcoming Android 3.0 tablet from Motorola Mobility have been some of the most popular items of the last three months.Yesterday, just before all the advance reviews were published, law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius filed a trademark suit with the US District Court for the Northern District of C...

Android Market e-books goes live; music and movies to follow?

By Tim Conneally, BetanewsThe Android Market has never had any specific ban on carrying and selling straight up text documents, and users could search through the market and find apps that were, in effect, standalone e-books. Now, however, there is a section dedicated specifically to e-books which currently features around 500 titles from publishers such as Simon and Schuster, Macmillan, W.W. Nort...

Android Market e-books goes live; music and movies to follow?

By Tim Conneally, BetanewsThe Android Market has never had any specific ban on carrying and selling straight up text documents, and users could search through the market and find apps that were, in effect, standalone e-books. Now, however, there is a section dedicated specifically to e-books which currently features around 500 titles from publishers such as Simon and Schuster, Macmillan, W.W. Nort...

Inside Intel's Thunderbolt: the next generation of connectivity

By Ed Oswald, BetanewsSomewhat hidden in between Apple's announcement Thursday of new MacBook Pro laptops was the debut of a new method of PC connectivity: Thunderbolt. It can be most easily explained as the next generation of FireWire, allowing for transfer speeds of up to 10Gbps.Those who stand to benefit the most from Thunderbolt would be those in the audio-visual industries, which Intel itself...

IE9's 'Do Not Track' features could become Web standards

By Tim Conneally, BetanewsThe World Wide Web Consortium (W3C,) the standards body responsible for HTML5, accepted and published Microsoft's member submission for standardized privacy features on Thursday.Last year, the Federal Trade Commission endorsed a framework for consumer privacy which suggested a persistent browser setting to protect users from services that collect and harvest browser data ...

Apple previews mobile-inspired Mac OS Lion to developers

By Tim Conneally, BetanewsLast October, Apple gave the public its first look at OS X 10.7 "Lion", illustrating Cupertino's vision of mobile-inspired future versions of the Mac operating system. Thursday, the company has released its first developer preview of the OS to members of the Mac Developer Program.Since the launch of the iPhone, Apple has shifted its strategies to focus squarely on the mob...

Apple previews mobile-inspired Mac OS Lion to developers

By Tim Conneally, BetanewsLast October, Apple gave the public its first look at OS X 10.7 "Lion", illustrating Cupertino's vision of mobile-inspired future versions of the Mac operating system. Thursday, the company has released its first developer preview of the OS to members of the Mac Developer Program.Since the launch of the iPhone, Apple has shifted its strategies to focus squarely on the mob...

Is News Corp.'s 'The Daily' giving you more blues than news?

By Joe Wilcox, BetanewsEvery single person I know with an iPad who has used News Corp.'s "The Daily" complains about persistent crashes and really, really, really, slow update times. Now PaidContent reports that the initial two-week free introduction promotion is going on and on and on, kind of like those wait times for news content to download. The Daily Publisher Greg Clayman says a decision on ...

Democratic Senators move to block GOP from dismantling net neutrality rules

By Tim Conneally, BetanewsFour Democratic Senators on Wednesday sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, urging them to quash the GOP-led House Resolution to overturn the Federal Communications Commission's new net neutrality rules with either the appropriations process or the Congressional Review Act.The letter, drafted by Senators John Kerry (D-MA),...

5 must-try Windows email applications

By Nick PeersDo you need an email client? These days, many people see the advantage of accessing their email through the web -- not only does this enable you to check it on any internet-enabled computer, it saves you having to open a separate program each time you want to check your email.Having said that, you'll need to consider a dedicated email client if you want to access your email offline, o...

5 must-try Windows email applications

By Nick PeersDo you need an email client? These days, many people see the advantage of accessing their email through the web -- not only does this enable you to check it on any internet-enabled computer, it saves you having to open a separate program each time you want to check your email.Having said that, you'll need to consider a dedicated email client if you want to access your email offline, o...

Microsoft yanks Windows Phone 7 update for Samsung devices

By Tim Conneally, BetanewsThe minor update to Windows Phone 7 that started rolling out on Monday has been problematic for Samsung devices running the OS, and Microsoft has stalled the update process. The update, according to Michael Stroh in the Windows Phone Blog, was "designed to improve the software update process itself."As soon as the update started rolling out, owners of the Samsung Omnia 7 ...

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