The Facebook IPO is not just long awaited, but one of the most interesting public offerings of our generation. Unlike the countless tech companies that came before it, Facebook doesn’t offer anything tangible; rather it’s simply a platform to help share our private information. [......]
Archive for the ‘Hardware’ Category
Google Docs and Office Web apps have gone a long way towards offering a compelling solution for storing our documents online, but for those in need of offline access, Open Office used to be the best free alterative to Microsoft around. Fast forward to 2012 however, and Open Office hasn’t just fallen off the map, it has been lapped several times by a new community fork called LibreOffice . According to new statistics offered up by the community, LibreOffice monthly commits is now in the 1500-3000 range, with the vast majority of new code coming from TDF volunteers, as opposed to large corporations such has Red Hat, Oracle, or Canonical[......]
HH Gregg advertisement Every year in late January or early February, two teams take to the field to play a football game that's watched by tens of millions of Americans. And every year, businesses launch ad campaigns to sell a variety of products—televisions, pizzas, soda—in conjunction with the game. And the overwhelming majority of these businesses avoid calling it the "Super Bowl." Why[......]
Nobody in their right mind would dump their desktop or notebook PC for a smartphone, but plenty of people are willing to own both as they seek to stay connected and check email on the fly. Underscoring this point is fact that smartphone sales in 2011 skipped ahead of PC sales, and by a pretty wide margin, according to data released by Canalys. Canalys says vendors shipped 158.5 million smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2011, up 57 percent on the 101.2 million units shipped in the same quarter one year prior. [......]
Earlier this week, we reported on efforts by an Indiana state legislator who was interested in getting creationism inserted into the state's science classrooms. He managed to get a modified bill , one that was less sectarian but still overtly promoted religion, passed by the state's Senate[......]
A group of former FDA scientists who spoke out against the agency's allegedly flawed device-approval process are suing the feds for intercepting Gmail and Yahoo Mail messages by installing spy programs on their work computers. Although the computers were owned by the government, the plaintiffs say they were explicitly granted the right to use them for personal purposes. Back in January 2009, nine scientists known as the "FDA Nine" anonymously wrote to the leader of then President-elect Barack Obama's transition team "pleading with him to restructure the agency," the Wall Street Journal reported at the time[......]
Apple updated iBooks Author to version 1.0.1 on Friday afternoon, the only change being an update to the software's controversial end user license agreement. The updated EULA now specifically only applies distribution restrictions to the interactive .ibooks format files generated by the app. [......]
The CEO of Micron Technology, Steve Appleton, died in a small plane crash today in Boise, Idaho. He was 51[......]
Maybe it was too thick, maybe it was too heavy, maybe you just didn’t like Honeycomb. Regardless of your reasoning, you may want to keep your eyes peeled on your credit score if you bought and returned a Motorola Xoom between March and October 2011, because your personal information may be in someone else’s hands[......]
Kim Dotcom testifying in court Thursday Megaupload boss Kim Dotcom (read our in-depth profile ) was denied bail on Thursday by a New Zealand court. Dotcom insisted that he had no desire to flee the country and merely wanted to be with his pregnant wife and their three young children. [......]
Quick question: what's the one thing you should absolutely, positively do any time you trade in or return a piece of used tech? [......]
Anger at last month's decision by the European Union and 22 of its member states to sign the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has led to widespread protests, hacked Web sites, and legislators backing away from the treaty. The anti-ACTA protests that saw Polish politicians don Guy Fawkes masks in parliament have borne fruit. After experiencing a considerable backlash in Poland, Prime Minister Donald Tusk has suspended ratification of the controversial agreement, acknowledging that the consultation surrounding it was inadequate and that he approached it from a "20th century perspective." The ACTA agreement has been signed already by an EU representative and ambassadors from 22 of the EU's 27 member states. [......]
Dropbox has a lot of things going for it, but if you use the cloud storage service with any regularity, there's a good chance you'll bang up against the 2GB offered in the free version fairly quickly. (Assuming that you don't Gmail account chain trick outlined in our Dropbox Cheat Sheet , that is.) If you're chafing at your no-cost bonds, the service is giving you an opportunity to add up to another 5GB of space absolutely free -- if you're willing to be a guinea pig, that is. Dropbox is still working out kinks in its as-yet-unreleased automatic photo and video upload support, you see. [......]
Apple will be able to sell its iPad 2 with 3G, iPhone 3GS, and iPhone 4 via its online store in Germany after all, thanks to a temporary extension courtesy of a German court. As noted by the BBC , an appeals court lifted the ban on certain iOS devices just after Apple was forced to remove them from its German online store earlier on Friday. Still, not all is going Apple's way, as a Mannheim Regional Court also ruled on Friday that Apple had infringed upon a patent owned by Motorola that allows devices to sync e-mail across devices wirelessly, which may spell out changes for iCloud users in Germany[......]
Google's Chrome browser failed to increase its market share last month for just the second time in two years, while Microsoft's Internet Explorer added more than a percentage point, according to data by NetMarketShare. That's not the start to 2012 Google was hoping for, though there are still reasons to be optimistic about Chrome's future. This is just one month, after all, and Chrome dropping from 19.11 percent in December 2011 to 18.94 percent in January 2012 is not cause for panic. [......]
