Category: Computers (Page 15 of 33)

      Tablet week begins

      January 25, 2010 /

      Steve Jobs with his Apple.With all the fervor surrounding this week’s Apple announcement, I thought it would be appropriate to begin the week with a quote rumored to come from one Steve Jobs himself. It goes something like this:

      “This will be the most important thing I’ve ever done”

      Now, that’s not confirmed, but it’s being reported on several sites today that claim Jobs is as excited about the tablet as he has ever been about an Apple product. And let’s consider what he’s saying. For Jobs this is more important than changing the face of the smartphone market. More important than pioneering the App Store model for the cellular world. He’s essentially relegated the iPhone to amuse-bouche status, a preparatory device for what we’ll get to see this Wednesday.

      I’m excited.

      Apple, Computers, News

      Kindle bestsellers don’t cost a thing

      January 24, 2010 /

      Kindle with a bookIt’s not a revolutionary concept. You want some visibility so you offer what would normally be a paid service or product for free. As word of mouth grows, you bump the price back to normal levels, occasionally higher, and profit. Easy enough.

      That’s what many book publishers are starting to do with titles on the Kindle, the New York Times reported this weekend. The article focuses on Maureen Johnson, an author whose young adult fiction has climbed as high as number three on the Kindle best-selling charts. It’s being run for free on the device to drive interest in her upcoming sequel, which will release this February.

      While some publishers – Random House and Scholastic for two – embrace the free model, others, like Hachette, find it “illogical.” They believe the price of ebooks is already too low, so why go any lower? In fact, a lot of publishers delay ebook publication for a few months after a book’s release to capitalize on hardcover sales.

      Obviously, as time goes on, we’re going to see publishers get more and more creative to keep profits up in the face of lower prices for retail media.

      Computers, Digital Media, Lifestyle

      Passwords haven’t improved

      January 22, 2010 /

      Password field.It’s rarely news that most people use terrible passwords. There are just so many to remember, and really, no one is all that good at remembering completely random strings of letters and numbers. Recently, though, we got a little more data behind this widely accepted fact.

      RockYou, a widget service for social networking sites, was recently hacked. The hacker retrieved passwords for 32 million accounts, which were stored in a database as plain text, and posted them online. Security firm iMPERVA took a look at the passwords and found some ridiculous stats. The most common password? 123456. That was followed by 12345, 123456789, and Password. That capital P is definitely important.

      iMPERVA esimated that a slow DSL connection could access one account every second using a simple dictionary hack. It’s hard to say whether people would use better passwords on sites that hold more sensitive data, but my inclination would be no. Why add more passwords to remember, even if they’re as simple as Password.

      Source: Ars Technica

      Computers

      Professionals still lament the 4:3 laptop

      January 21, 2010 /

      Lenovo 4:3 laptop.I got an email today asking if I knew where to find a 4:3 laptop. I thought it would be easy enough to find, but I quickly remembered seeing that Lenovo cancelled its last 4:3 about a year and a half ago. The only other option after 2007 was a Dell Latitude, and now that’s gone too.

      For a lot of professionals, a widescreen just doesn’t make sense. When you spend most of your time working with spreadsheets, text documents, and web browsers, you want a higher resolution with a longer page. Widescreen laptops are actually lower resolution and cheaper to manufacture, so it kind of makes sense for someone like Lenovo or Dell to go this route.

      Unfortunately, a lot of business people would still prefer a 4:3 screen. In a few quick searches I found hundreds of pages of results dedicated to finding 4:3 laptops, rebuilding exisiting 4:3 laptops, and discussing the lack of 4:3 laptops. From digging through a few of the posts, it seems a big part of the disappearance is consumer ignorance. Manufacturers have actually convinced the world that widescreen is better. I’ll leave you with a quote from one of the malinformed: “widescreen is better for reading text because your eyes are side by side not up and down so its easier to read left to right.” Yes, someone actually wrote that.

      Computers

      Apple event: more than just a tablet

      January 19, 2010 /

      iPhone OS 4.0Apple’s tablet is definitely the topic of conversation as we head toward Apple’s January event, but there could be more than just a hardware unveiling. There’s been a lot of speculation, in fact, about whether or not we’ll see iPhone OS 4.0 along with a tablet release.

      The tablet isn’t likely to be powerful enough to run a full-fledged version of OS X, which points to another, stripped-down version, much like the iPhone OS. Actually, it probably is the iPhone OS, just with some more robust features like multi-tasking. There have also been reports that OS 4.0 has been kept out of developers hands because it leaks features about the impending tablet.

      Whether it’s an updated iPhone OS or something else entirely, you can bet the tablet unveiling, if it even is that, will be about a whole lot more than just the hardware. For my money, I’d bet on an updated OS launching with the new machine.

      Apple, Computers, Mobile, News

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