C E P

On Monday, Hewlett-Packard unveiled the next generation of printers. ePrint printers are web-enabled, work in the cloud, and will print from e-mail. In addition, users can store documents or files in the cloud for direct printing on demand. Prices start at $99.

The HP printers are the first with the ability to talk to the Google cloud without needing a local proxy PC or web appliance. That means people can access Google Docs, photos and calendar directly from their printers. Companies like Yahoo, Facebook and Reuters are also making print apps that work with the new machines.

“This is HP making printers relevant again. Over the last few years, printers were increasingly irrelevant,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. “People are living on the web and printers were an anachronism looking back to the past before we had the web. By integrating the web into printers, suddenly they are relevant again.”

Relevant ePrint Usage

HP offers several “relevant” examples of how consumers can use the web-enabled printers with the ePrint platform. A mother and son can print drawings they created on the iPad. Or users can print from mobile devices like the Palm Pre or BlackBerry smartphone and pick up the documents at a FedEx Office store.

The HP ePrint printers come with a unique e-mail address that lets consumers print a document the same way they would send an e-mail message. Consumers can also send Microsoft Office documents, Adobe PDFs, JPEG images, and other file types using HP’s ePrintCenter. Documents are sent to the ePrintCenter’s e-mail address, which handles the image and sends it to an ePrint printer.

“As much as we talk about iPad and tablets, people don’t move from one type of thing to another very quickly. In fact, we’ve been talking about the paperless office since the early… More info

Popularity: 1% [?]

Apple launched its newest iPhone handset Monday, and although the iPhone 4G has already been seen around the world thanks to a leaked prototype, CEO Steve Jobs introduced such dazzling features as a gyroscope, FaceTime video chat, and a Retina Display with 326 pixels-per-square-inch resolution.

Live Demo

The iPhone model that turned up on a tech site after it was lost in April by an Apple engineer was deactivated remotely, so Monday’s debut at the Worldwide Developers’ Conference in San Francisco was the world’s first glimpse of a fully functioning iPhone with the latest operating system and apps.

Although the screen size is the same as the iPhone 3GS at 3.5 inches, the resolution is now 960 by 640 pixels, allowing for far better graphics and text when viewed at any size. “Once you use Retina Display, you can’t go back,” Jobs asserted.

The iPhone 4G is also 24 percent thinner, and a metallic band on its edge between two glass panels serves as an antenna. The iPhone 4G also has front and back cameras for video chatting, and dual microphones for noise reduction. It’s greener, too, with no mercury, PVC or arsenic and a longer battery life. Pre-orders will start next week.

Jobs only briefly alluded to the wayward prototype by saying “there have been photos around” and “you have to see it in person.”

Demonstrating a gyroscope that allows the processor to manipulate graphics based on movement of the device or the user, which opens unlimited gaming-app possibilities, Jobs said “These phones are getting more and more intelligent about the world around them.”

In typical fashion, Jobs cast the device as further revolutionizing the smartphone, as the first iPhone did three years ago.
<
"In 2007, iPhone reinvented what we thought of as a smartphone," he said. "It's hard to remember what it was like. It… Details

Popularity: 1% [?]

AP – Jupiter has gotten whacked again.

On Jupiter something happened on 03 against 05/04/2010

An amateur astronomer in Australia peering at the giant gas planet Thursday reported witnessing a bright flash from an object hitting Jupiter and apparently burning up in the atmosphere.

“When I saw the flash, I couldn’t believe it,” said amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley. “The fireball lasted about 2 seconds and was very bright.”

Wesley, a computer programmer with a good reputation among professional astronomers, alerted the cosmic collision to professional and amateur sky-gazers. The discovery was later confirmed by another amateur astronomer in the Philippines…

Read more

Popularity: 1% [?]

Google is dropping Windows. The search giant will use Mac or Linux operating systems on all employee computers because of security concerns about Microsoft’s Windows.

The Financial Times, quoting several unnamed Google employees, reported the story on Tuesday. It said the move away from Windows began in January after the search giant was attacked by hackers in China. Most Google employees are choosing Mac, one source told the Times. Google hasn’t commented on the report.

‘Something’s Not Right’

Microsoft’s head of corporate communications, Frank X. Shaw, noted in a Twitter post that the Chinese security breaches involved “IE 6 and employee behavior,” not Windows per se. “Something’s not right w/the FT.com Google-dumps-Windows story,” he wrote. Except for Shaw’s tweets, Microsoft hasn’t commented on the report.

If a Google employee wants to remain on Windows, special clearance is reportedly required from senior executives, and getting a new Windows machine requires specific approval from the company’s CIO.

The security breach was reported by Google in mid-January. In a post on the Official Google Blog, Chief Legal Officer David Drummond revealed that, in “mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google.”

The attack, he noted, was not just on Google, but on a “wide range of businesses” involved in the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors. Drummond said “a primary goal was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human-rights activists,” which was apparently not successful. Reports by independent security consultants indicated that the attackers appear to have been working directly or indirectly on behalf of Chinese government intelligence agencies.

Trojan as a Windows DLL

According to iDefense Labs, an independent security company, the December attack used malicious code delivered via PDF e-mail attachments, which deposited a backdoor Trojan as a Windows DLL.

Like… Read more

Popularity: 1% [?]

The PDF, or portable document format, has become a mainstay of the computer world, with everything from user guides to newsletters available in the ubiquitous format.

It’s been about 15 years since Adobe released its Acrobat program for creating these files. The drawback is its high cost. But there are alternatives out there that are free, just like the Adobe Reader program — for reading PDFs — which comes preinstalled on most of today’s computers.

The trick is finding the option that’s right for you. And it’s not a bad idea to diversify, since Reader has recently become the target of hacker attacks.

The big plus of PDF documents is that they can be easily passed between different computers. “PDFs are displayed on every computer with the proper software, looking just like the original document. That’s called fixed layout,” says Dieter Brors of c’t, a German computer magazine.

The other plus is that, in general, the contents of PDFs cannot be altered.

That’s a big plus over sharing data with, for example, a Word file. Such sharing can go awry over little things, such as if the recipient has a different printer driver than the sender, ruining the text’s formatting. Such surprises were common before PDF use became standard, says Ulrich Isermeyer, who is responsible for Acrobat at Adobe.

There is competition to the PDF though. Microsoft’s XPS also offers fixed layouts.

“But if I was a manufacturer and had to, for example, distribute a user manual as a document, I would not do that in XPS,” says Enno Bruns of Computer Bild, a German technology magazine, noting that it would not be likely that every customer would have the right reading program.

Acrobat is currently up to its ninth version. “The new version will come this year,” says Isermeyer. Depending on the format, it will be available… Details

Popularity: 1% [?]

PC World – New Yorker Barry Hoggard draws a line in the sand when it comes to online privacy. In May he said farewell to 1251 Facebook friends by deleting his account of four years to protest what he calls the social network’s eroding privacy policies. Details

Popularity: 1% [?]

PowerDVD 9

The No.1 Movie Experience on the PC
PowerDVD offers the best HD and Blu-ray playback around! Use TrueTheater™ to up DVD quality for viewing in an HD display. Navigate easily with Fancy View, flipping through your movie titles and previewing content. There are plenty of other useful interactive features for die-hard movie fans and the casual viewer alike. PowerDVD 9 is truly the way HD and Blu-ray were meant to be enjoyed! Purchase PowerDVD 9 Deluxe by 3/31/2009 and get $20 Instant Savings from TigerDirect.com.

The Best Blu-ray/DVD Player Software Today

World-renowned PowerDVD 9 delivers outstanding Blu-ray and DVD movie playback quality on your PC.

• NEW Unparalleled HD movie experience: The best video quality today with incomparable support for all HD video formats like AVCHD, AVCREC, MPEG-4 AVC (H.264), MPEG-2 HD and WMV-HD
• NEW HDMI 1.3 Support: HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) simultaneously transfers 8 channels of audio over a single cable
• NEW PC friendly: Play your HD movies on high or low spec CPUs.
• High-Def Home Theater Audio: Supports Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD…

Popularity: 5% [?]