If you are one of the millions of people who use Google’s online search engine, email or YouTube video site, you might want to pay close attention. Google is changing its privacy policy to allow it to track users across services.
The company says beginning March 1, it is turning its more than 60 different privacy policies into one policy that will cover multiple products and features to create a “simple and intuitive” experience……. (read the whole story)
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Hewlett-Packard announced Thursday that it will continue selling personal computers after all, reversing an earlier decision to exit one of its core business lines.
The company shocked Wall Street and the tech industry alike when it announced Aug. 18 that its board was exploring “strategic alternatives” for its Personal Systems unit. That division mainly comprises HP’s PC business, which is the world’s largest. A sale or spin-off were two of the options being considered.
Can Windows 8 save the PC from extinction?
ANAHEIM, Calif. (CNNMoney) — There’s no question that Microsoft got the message: Mobile devices and tablets are the future of computing. Here’s the next quandary: Is Windows 8 enough to salvage the PC, or is it too late?
Love it or hate it, Microsoft made a bold bet with its radically redesigned, re-engineered Windows 8. It rejected Apple chairman Steve Jobs’ declaration in March that the post-PC era has begun……..(read the whole story)
If you are into the serious business (or interests) of editing meta data for digital pictures, you may want to take a look at this tool called ExifTool. This free software basically can do anything about the “tags” of digital pictures, copying, renaming, standardizing and what not. This is a powerful tool with all kinds of parameters and built-in flexibility. It is not for everyone, though, as using it does require some computer knowledge especially for its advanced features. Do give it a try if you run out of options.
Steve Jobs stepped down as Apple CEO on Wednesday. Here is his resignation letter.
To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community: I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.
I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.
As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.
I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.
I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.
Steve.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Hewlett-Packard is taking a hatchet to its business and doing some radical restructuring.
The company said Thursday that it is looking to spin off its industry-leading but struggling personal computer business. HP also killed off the TouchPad tablet it launched last month, as well as its webOS smartphone line.
The move essentially leaves for dead the webOS software HP got by acquiring Palm last year, though the company said it will continue trying to “optimize the value” of its purchase. Though the move was unexpected, it’s not all that surprising: Despite a huge marketing campaign, TouchPad sales struggled so much that HP almost immediately cut the tablet’s price by $100. HP said none of its webOS products reached the company’s internal sales targets.
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There are so many different codecs these days, supporting different formats of videos and audio. And there are also software trying to overwrite each other during its installation on your computer. It is not uncommon to find out one day, when you try to play a video file in certain format, the computer complains a specific codec is missing.
Normally you can reinstall the software that supports the missing codec and the problem should be fixed. In this case that I would like to talk about, the missing codec is the Windows Media Series 9 codec (WMV3). The codec is included when you install Windows Media Player. Alternately the codec is downloaded from the Microsoft site when a video file of this format is first played.
In some rare cases, Windows Media Player cannot and will not automatically download the codec. And there is no common software you can install to get the WMV3 codec. A solution is to uninstall the current version of Windows Media Player (in this case, version 11) and rollback to the previous version. When the old version plays the first file with WMV3 codec, it will download the codec from the Microsoft site. Once that’s done, you can upgrade the media player back to the current version.
When using ‘Upload Applet’ to upload pictures to Gallery2, broken thumbnails may occur unpredictably. A maintenance will need to done to rebuild all thumbnails. The problem may be resolved by changing the priority of which graphic toolkit to use in the Administrator’s Site Admin page.
If NetPBM is the highest on the list, try lower it down below Gd. ImageMagick is not activated in this case. (Note: the hosting service provider is 1and1.)
If problems were encountered during installaiton of Roxio Creator 2010 PRO on a Windows 7 64-bit system, chances are it can be fixed by running the setup.exe file under compatibility mode (Vista Service Pack 2 in this case).
For this specific problem, the error was tracked down to a file 1033.mst that could not be located during installation. Once the setup was run under the above-mentioned compatibilty mode, the installaion went smoothly without any issue.
VideoWave, the video editing module of Roxio Creator suite, may encounter problems when editing an MPEG-2 video clip if Internet Explorer version 9 is installed on the computer. When trimming an MPEG-2 video clip, the play button simply will not respond. Uninstalling IE9, which should automatically rolls back to v8 will resolve the problem.