http://www.pcworld.com TechHive helps you find your tech sweet spot. We guide you to products you'll love and show you how to get the most out of them. en-us Sat, 03 Nov 2012 23:59:18 -0700 Sat, 03 Nov 2012 23:59:18 -0700 Note: This article was originally published in late September 2012. However, following hurricane Sandy and increased concerns about disaster preparedness, we have decided to reprint this guide. If you have any suggestions not covered in the article, please share your ideas in a comment below. You don't have to look hard to find tales of technological disaster. The Gauss virus infiltrated thousands of Middle Eastern PCs, where it could intercept online banking credentials. Apple iPhones were revealed to be vulnerable to spoofed SMS messages. Floods all but demolished Western Digital's hard drive production facilities in Thailand. Closer to home, writer Mat Honan saw his digital life all but erased when a hacker used a couple of phone calls to order a remote wipe of his MacBook Air. Honan says that he lost more than a year's worth of photos after the breach—photos that, of course, he hadn't backed up. These incidents—and to some degree, anything that goes wrong with your tech universe—have one thing in common: With careful planning, the victims could have rendered the problems much easier to recover from. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Chris Bross, Senior Enterprise Recovery Engineer at DriveSavers, said his company has been busy with an uptick in business, working to reclaim the data on everything from home users' single-disk drives to business-level servers. Some of the hard drives have been damaged by water, he said, but even more have been fried by power surges related to the storm. The good news, he said, is that the majority of damaged hard drives can be recovered—albeit for a hefty price. DriveSavers charges an average of $1,000 to $1,500 to save the data from a single, consumer-grade drive, though the company is offering $500 off for severe weather victims. DTI Data, another drive recovery service, also charges $1,000 for consumer drives if the company has to physically open it, said John Best, DTI's director of information technology. If the company can save the drive without cracking it open, the price drops to about $500. For New Yorkers, DTI has a local recovery center that accepts drop-offs. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here As the holiday shopping season gets into gear, November promises to be a good month for consumers seeking bargains on budget laptop computers and HDTVs. Tablet shoppers, though, are less likely to see much price movement, as many slate lines are already being offered at rock bottom selling points. Traditionally, the holiday bargain season begins on Black Friday—the Friday after Thanksgiving—but some merchants have already begun offering Black-Friday-like deals in hopes of producing more favorable holiday sales numbers than last year. One of the hottest selling categories this holiday season will be tablet computers, but the real bargains will be in budget laptops. That's because tablet prices are so low already there won't be much "give" on their pricing in the coming weeks. A slate like the Kindle Fire, for example, costs more to make than it's selling for. "[T]here isn't much room for discounts, and the best we might see in terms of tablet deals this Black Friday will likely be promotions that bundle these devices with a sizable gift card or credit," bargain hunter site DealNews.com predicts in its monthly best/worst buys report published earlier this week. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The total value spend of Near Field Communication (NFC) mobile payments will rise from $4 billion in 2012 to $191 billion in 2017, breaking the $100 billion mark in 2016. Despite Apple rejecting NFC for its latest smartphone, the iPhone 5, or its mobile operating system, iOS 6, ABI Research has forecast a huge rise in such payments. See iPhone 5 review and iOS 6 review Mobile payments and more importantly the convergence between payment types—proximity, P2P, and online—stored on a single NFC handset will be the initial trigger, driving market convergence across a host of other markets, including ticketing, retail, loyalty, and access control. (See also What going cashless means for your privacy). Market convergence is not quite ready for mass commercial roll out, but the potential value add that NFC brings has been identified. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The Industrial Revolution transformed four key aspects of society—innovation, transportation, communication and financial markets—changing the world forever. Although it began more than 200 years ago, there are surprising some parallels between this historically transformative period and IT security. The dynamics of the threat landscape and the increasing complexity of IT environments have given rise to a new era: The "Industrialization of Hacking." Just as the Industrial Revolution created faster, better and more efficient sectors of the economy, the Industrialization of Hacking has created faster, more effective and more efficient malicious group of hackers who seek to profit from attacks to our IT infrastructure. This era has profound influences on how CIOs should direct the protection of IT systems today and the future-proofing strategies to employ to safeguard them tomorrow. Visibility, control and protection must all be central to the architecture of any effective network security solution. As an IT business defender, you must understand the baseline of your environment before you can protect it. You cannot protect what you cannot see. And, of course, once you 'see it', then you can control it and protect it. Modern security architecture should also have the flexibility to be readily adaptable to evolving security needs. It is crucial that you are able to adjust your protection, as both your IT environment and the threat landscape evolve. Moreover, it is important that these adjustments can be done economically, without ripping and replacing existing systems. The Industrialization of Hacking is a useful lens through which CIOs and IT managers can view and explain to lay stakeholders the complexity of the dynamics between constantly evolving IT systems and the threat environments which can undermine them. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Oprah Winfrey is wowed, and that's good news for Microsoft and the prospects for its Surface tablet. Likening it to a Mercedes-Benz that you can hold in your hand, the Queen of Gab has put the new device on her list of Oprah's Favorite Things 2012. The endorsement comes at a good time for Microsoft, as it seeks to siphon away customers from Apple, maker of the wildly popular iPad, and win over the skeptics. A recent Associated Press survey found 69 percent of consumers had little or no interest in buying a Surface. "The full-size keyboard built right into the cover makes work easy, the very smart kickstand makes watching a movie or Skyping a friend a delight, the less than a pound-and-a-half weight makes a great alternative to a laptop, and the many other features make it fun for work and play. Now, that's a wowser!" Winfrey wrote on her website. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano says the nation's largest financial institutions "are actively under attack" by cybercriminals, and one expert says it is a trend contributing to the rising security costs of banks. Napolitano told attendees of a cybersecurity event hosted by The Washington Post that the attackers were stealing information and money, but refused during questioning to provide details. "I really don't want to go into that per se," she said, according to a report in The Hill. "Right now, financial institutions are actively under attack. We know that. I'm not giving you any classified information," Napolitano said. "I will say this has involved some of our nation's largest institutions. We've also had our stock exchanges attacked over the last [few] years, so we know ... there are vulnerabilities. We're working with them on that." Napolitano's comments followed about a month after a series of distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) disrupted online operations of a number of major banks, including PNC Bank, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, SunTrust Banks and Capital One Financial. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Facebook is testing a new design for its Timeline interface. Instead of two columns of updates, the experimental interface has just one. Half the columns makes it twice as nice. I expect Facebook to implement the experimental layout, or a variation on it, systemwide. The reason is that Facebook's current, multi-column stream is amateur-hour design that subtly irritates and frustrates mainstream users. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Facebook bought Instagram for nearly $1 billion in part because users love the photo filter app. Rival social networking service Twitter apparently sees the value and plans to introduce a similar feature to its mobile apps, a new report says. Photo manipulation is a hot commodity in social networking products. Google recently acquired Nik Software, the German company behind Snapseed, a popular iOS photo app that's similar to Instagram. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here When Bill Buxton worked at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in the early 1990s, he examined the classic children's homemade telephones: two cups connected by a taut string. He wondered why that same concept couldn't improve computer keyboards. Think about it. The cup is both a microphone and a speaker. It uses the same "hardware" for input and output of sound. Why, Buxton asked, couldn't the same principle apply to text on computers—using a single device for both input and output of text rather than using input from a keyboard to produce output on a screen? Buxton wasn't alone in recognizing an eventual fusion of the two. Fast-forward a couple decades—and add myriad researchers and huge corporate R&D budgets—and we have touch-screen keyboards on tablets and smartphones. Inputs and outputs share the same surface. The keyboard has fused with the screen, at least for some computing tasks. But as anyone who's typed on a virtual keyboard—or yelled at a voice-control app like Siri—can attest, no current text input holds a candle to a traditional computer keyboard when it comes to comfort, speed and accuracy. Maybe eventually we'll connect computers to our neurons, but in the meantime, the simple yet highly functional electromechanical keyboard will be around -- and keep improving -- for some time. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
http://www.pcworld.com TechHive helps you find your tech sweet spot. We guide you to products you'll love and show you how to get the most out of them. en-us Sat, 03 Nov 2012 23:59:18 -0700 Sat, 03 Nov 2012 23:59:18 -0700 Note: This article was originally published in late September 2012. However, following hurricane Sandy and increased concerns about disaster preparedness, we have decided to reprint this guide. If you have any suggestions not covered in the article, please share your ideas in a comment below. You don't have to look hard to find tales of technological disaster. The Gauss virus infiltrated thousands of Middle Eastern PCs, where it could intercept online banking credentials. Apple iPhones were revealed to be vulnerable to spoofed SMS messages. Floods all but demolished Western Digital's hard drive production facilities in Thailand. Closer to home, writer Mat Honan saw his digital life all but erased when a hacker used a couple of phone calls to order a remote wipe of his MacBook Air. Honan says that he lost more than a year's worth of photos after the breach—photos that, of course, he hadn't backed up. These incidents—and to some degree, anything that goes wrong with your tech universe—have one thing in common: With careful planning, the victims could have rendered the problems much easier to recover from. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Chris Bross, Senior Enterprise Recovery Engineer at DriveSavers, said his company has been busy with an uptick in business, working to reclaim the data on everything from home users' single-disk drives to business-level servers. Some of the hard drives have been damaged by water, he said, but even more have been fried by power surges related to the storm. The good news, he said, is that the majority of damaged hard drives can be recovered—albeit for a hefty price. DriveSavers charges an average of $1,000 to $1,500 to save the data from a single, consumer-grade drive, though the company is offering $500 off for severe weather victims. DTI Data, another drive recovery service, also charges $1,000 for consumer drives if the company has to physically open it, said John Best, DTI's director of information technology. If the company can save the drive without cracking it open, the price drops to about $500. For New Yorkers, DTI has a local recovery center that accepts drop-offs. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here As the holiday shopping season gets into gear, November promises to be a good month for consumers seeking bargains on budget laptop computers and HDTVs. Tablet shoppers, though, are less likely to see much price movement, as many slate lines are already being offered at rock bottom selling points. Traditionally, the holiday bargain season begins on Black Friday—the Friday after Thanksgiving—but some merchants have already begun offering Black-Friday-like deals in hopes of producing more favorable holiday sales numbers than last year. One of the hottest selling categories this holiday season will be tablet computers, but the real bargains will be in budget laptops. That's because tablet prices are so low already there won't be much "give" on their pricing in the coming weeks. A slate like the Kindle Fire, for example, costs more to make than it's selling for. "[T]here isn't much room for discounts, and the best we might see in terms of tablet deals this Black Friday will likely be promotions that bundle these devices with a sizable gift card or credit," bargain hunter site DealNews.com predicts in its monthly best/worst buys report published earlier this week. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The total value spend of Near Field Communication (NFC) mobile payments will rise from $4 billion in 2012 to $191 billion in 2017, breaking the $100 billion mark in 2016. Despite Apple rejecting NFC for its latest smartphone, the iPhone 5, or its mobile operating system, iOS 6, ABI Research has forecast a huge rise in such payments. See iPhone 5 review and iOS 6 review Mobile payments and more importantly the convergence between payment types—proximity, P2P, and online—stored on a single NFC handset will be the initial trigger, driving market convergence across a host of other markets, including ticketing, retail, loyalty, and access control. (See also What going cashless means for your privacy). Market convergence is not quite ready for mass commercial roll out, but the potential value add that NFC brings has been identified. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The Industrial Revolution transformed four key aspects of society—innovation, transportation, communication and financial markets—changing the world forever. Although it began more than 200 years ago, there are surprising some parallels between this historically transformative period and IT security. The dynamics of the threat landscape and the increasing complexity of IT environments have given rise to a new era: The "Industrialization of Hacking." Just as the Industrial Revolution created faster, better and more efficient sectors of the economy, the Industrialization of Hacking has created faster, more effective and more efficient malicious group of hackers who seek to profit from attacks to our IT infrastructure. This era has profound influences on how CIOs should direct the protection of IT systems today and the future-proofing strategies to employ to safeguard them tomorrow. Visibility, control and protection must all be central to the architecture of any effective network security solution. As an IT business defender, you must understand the baseline of your environment before you can protect it. You cannot protect what you cannot see. And, of course, once you 'see it', then you can control it and protect it. Modern security architecture should also have the flexibility to be readily adaptable to evolving security needs. It is crucial that you are able to adjust your protection, as both your IT environment and the threat landscape evolve. Moreover, it is important that these adjustments can be done economically, without ripping and replacing existing systems. The Industrialization of Hacking is a useful lens through which CIOs and IT managers can view and explain to lay stakeholders the complexity of the dynamics between constantly evolving IT systems and the threat environments which can undermine them. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Oprah Winfrey is wowed, and that's good news for Microsoft and the prospects for its Surface tablet. Likening it to a Mercedes-Benz that you can hold in your hand, the Queen of Gab has put the new device on her list of Oprah's Favorite Things 2012. The endorsement comes at a good time for Microsoft, as it seeks to siphon away customers from Apple, maker of the wildly popular iPad, and win over the skeptics. A recent Associated Press survey found 69 percent of consumers had little or no interest in buying a Surface. "The full-size keyboard built right into the cover makes work easy, the very smart kickstand makes watching a movie or Skyping a friend a delight, the less than a pound-and-a-half weight makes a great alternative to a laptop, and the many other features make it fun for work and play. Now, that's a wowser!" Winfrey wrote on her website. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano says the nation's largest financial institutions "are actively under attack" by cybercriminals, and one expert says it is a trend contributing to the rising security costs of banks. Napolitano told attendees of a cybersecurity event hosted by The Washington Post that the attackers were stealing information and money, but refused during questioning to provide details. "I really don't want to go into that per se," she said, according to a report in The Hill. "Right now, financial institutions are actively under attack. We know that. I'm not giving you any classified information," Napolitano said. "I will say this has involved some of our nation's largest institutions. We've also had our stock exchanges attacked over the last [few] years, so we know ... there are vulnerabilities. We're working with them on that." Napolitano's comments followed about a month after a series of distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) disrupted online operations of a number of major banks, including PNC Bank, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, SunTrust Banks and Capital One Financial. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Facebook is testing a new design for its Timeline interface. Instead of two columns of updates, the experimental interface has just one. Half the columns makes it twice as nice. I expect Facebook to implement the experimental layout, or a variation on it, systemwide. The reason is that Facebook's current, multi-column stream is amateur-hour design that subtly irritates and frustrates mainstream users. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Facebook bought Instagram for nearly $1 billion in part because users love the photo filter app. Rival social networking service Twitter apparently sees the value and plans to introduce a similar feature to its mobile apps, a new report says. Photo manipulation is a hot commodity in social networking products. Google recently acquired Nik Software, the German company behind Snapseed, a popular iOS photo app that's similar to Instagram. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here When Bill Buxton worked at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in the early 1990s, he examined the classic children's homemade telephones: two cups connected by a taut string. He wondered why that same concept couldn't improve computer keyboards. Think about it. The cup is both a microphone and a speaker. It uses the same "hardware" for input and output of sound. Why, Buxton asked, couldn't the same principle apply to text on computers—using a single device for both input and output of text rather than using input from a keyboard to produce output on a screen? Buxton wasn't alone in recognizing an eventual fusion of the two. Fast-forward a couple decades—and add myriad researchers and huge corporate R&D budgets—and we have touch-screen keyboards on tablets and smartphones. Inputs and outputs share the same surface. The keyboard has fused with the screen, at least for some computing tasks. But as anyone who's typed on a virtual keyboard—or yelled at a voice-control app like Siri—can attest, no current text input holds a candle to a traditional computer keyboard when it comes to comfort, speed and accuracy. Maybe eventually we'll connect computers to our neurons, but in the meantime, the simple yet highly functional electromechanical keyboard will be around -- and keep improving -- for some time. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
K2 images / Shutterstock.comTraditional shoppers on Black Friday morning are out in the cold. 
Black Friday madness 
Apple iTunes shows a link to donate to the Red Cross for Superstorm Sandy relief. 
Craigslist's Craig Newmark will match your donation to a charity on his list of about 24 groups. 
IGDA VictoriaColton Phillips participating in the Global Game Jam 2012 from Victora, BC, Canada. 
Rami hates racing games, so here's a piece of promotional art for the recently-released Need For Speed: Most Wanted game. Vroom vroom. 
You might call the Acid Music Studio bland, but it's efficient once you know it. 
