Asus offered the world a sneak peek at the company's upcoming Transformer 2 tablet at the AsiaD conference in Hong Kong earlier this week, laying to rest speculation that the device's launch might be delayed. The Transformer 2 is a tablet with a detachable keyboard and a 10-inch screen. It will run on Nvidia's Kal-El quad-core Tegra 3 processor and have USB and mini-HDMI ports, Shih said. The addition of the keyboard takes the Transformer 2 into netbook territory, which is being invaded strongly by tablets.
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Microsoft is partnering with two of the most visible players in the education industry -- Sesame Workshop and National Geographic -- to roll out a series of new "edutainment" video games for its Xbox 360 platform. The games -- "Kinect Sesame Street TV," "Kinect Nat Geo TV" and the code-named "Project Columbia" -- let children interact with characters on screen, taking advantage of the Kinect motion camera accessory. The young viewers can, for example, sing or count along with Elmo and Cookie Monster on "Sesame Street" with Kinect's full-body and voice recognition.
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I've been thinking about tweener devices lately -- media devices bigger than an iPod touch but smaller than an iPad. This is mostly because of Amazon's Kindle Fire, which sports a wide 7-inch screen. Now, with the latest rumors coming out of Taiwan indicating Apple is looking over 7.85-inch screens, I'm more confused than ever. These smaller form-factor iPads -- if Apple does indeed use a 7.85-inch screen to create such a device -- would immediately fly in the face of the disparaging comments Steve Jobs made about them a year or so ago.
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The stuttering and freezing that can occur when you're streaming video are indicative of issues related to bandwidth. Commercial hosted solutions like Netflix and Hulu can suffer from degraded performance. Rather than simply calling your ISP and requesting a faster, more expensive pipe, there are some steps you can take first to optimize your existing environment for video streaming. First, turn off your modem, router, computer and add-ons, wait a minute, and then turn them all back on starting with the modem, then the router and then the other gear.
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It's often the case that anticipating a thing is just as pleasurable as the thing itself, and that seemed to be more true than ever with the latest Ubuntu release. Yes, Ubuntu 11.10, or "Oneiric Ocelot," made its long-awaited debut exactly a week ago, apparently -- though not unanimously -- bringing considerable pleasure to users far and wide. At least equally intriguing, however, was the so-called "countdown" that was launched ahead of time, presumably to mark the days until the big release.
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Google unveiled Android 4.0, aka "Ice Cream Sandwich," in Hong Kong on Wednesday. The presentation was accompanied by Samsung's announcement of the Galaxy Nexus, the first smartphone running Ice Cream Sandwich. Ice Cream Sandwich is a redesign of the Android OS. It has a highly visual interface, a facial-recognition feature and home-screen folders. "At one level, you could say that both Apple and Google are simply addressing the needs and wishes of increasingly sophisticated smartphone users by adding similar features and technologies," Pund-IT's Charles King said.
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Malware that appears to be similar to the highly toxic Stuxnet worm was made public Tuesday by security firm Symantec. Duqu, named for the "~DQ" file names it creates, appears to work as a remote access data-collecting program that uses some of the same infecting techniques as Stuxnet, the malware discovered about a year ago infiltrating global computer systems, particularly in Iran. The extent of Stuxnet's damage isn't entirely known, but some researchers argue it was the most malicious and advanced bit of malware to date.
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Can a new mobile operating system pull Research In Motion, maker of BlackBerry devices, out of its current funk? Not only has the company been steadily losing market share to competitors with flashier phones -- namely Apple and makers of Android handsets -- but its worldwide network recently experienced technical difficulties that left some of its customers without service for as long as three days. It was against that backdrop that RIM CoCEO Mike Lazaridis announced Tuesday at the company's developers conference a new operating system for future BlackBerry models.
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How many times have you accidentally deleted a photo you really needed from a digital camera or attached storage medium? We've all been there and done that! Sure, if you delete most files -- even some standard graphics images -- from the hard drive, the Linux trash can visibly holds the goods. But unless you know about PhotoRec, your deleted photographic images and files from anywhere else stay buried in hidden-file hell. PhotoRec is a powerful recovery tool that is part of a larger disk and file recovery package.
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Posted by Ed Moyle - October 19th, 2011 Comments Off
Organizations love false economies. It may not be an entirely conscious act on their part, but it's certainly the truth: Hang around any organization long enough, and you'll find at least one instance where it tries to save on doing A but winds up spending more on doing B in the process. Consider, for example, expense policies that require employees to stay one or more extra nights when traveling. Because airfare is lower when weekend travel is involved, organizations might be tempted to ask employees to do this to keep air costs down.
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