AlexLee.eu

Some great news from Google…

Privacy bodies have welcomed Google’s decision to anonymise personal data it receives from users’ web searches.

Excellent news, one of my concerns around how Google was moving was in the amount of information it was capturing through its various applications and tools.

I don’t quite see how some businesses can be looking at using Google docs to replace the applications they are using to create spreadsheets etc. Allowing company sensitive information out doesn’t seem right and I don’t think I will ever get into the habit of using resources such as Google calendar, I’ve heard so many stories of these being publicly shared without the owner’s permission.

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Samsung new MH80 HDDs will be fully compatible with Windows Vista and will offer OneNAND Flash onboard in capacities of 128MB or 256MB. The onboard flash allows for up to 50% faster OS boots, quicker resume times and increases in battery life of up to 30 minutes.

“As a leader in both hard drive and flash memory technologies, Samsung brings to market a unique hybrid hard drive that is sure to revolutionize the notebook computing experience,” said Albert Kim, National Sales Manager, Storage Systems for Samsung Semiconductor. “The MH80 hybrid hard drive provides the ideal solution for two major issues that notebook PC users continually face: faster boot and resume performance and extended battery life.”

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Apple PR? & Cisco PR

Cisco® and Apple® today announced that they have resolved their dispute involving the “iPhone” trademark. Under the agreement, both companies are free to use the “iPhone” trademark on their products throughout the world. Both companies acknowledge the trademark ownership rights that have been granted, and each side will dismiss any pending actions regarding the trademark. In addition, Cisco and Apple will explore opportunities for interoperability in the areas of security, and consumer and enterprise communications. Other terms of the agreement are confidential.

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Taken from the BBC.

AOL has joined Microsoft in supporting Open ID, giving the free identification scheme 63 million new users.

OpenID is a decentralised identification system that lets individuals use a single password for any site that supports it.

This is great news for Open ID which has been slow to take off despite its promise.

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Yahoo have released a service and it is one straight from the labs of Yahoo and not bought in for a change.

It is also a first and a brilliant idea!!

It is called pipes and is a free service that lets you catch popular feed types and then manipulate them and mix them up to create a data ‘mashup’.

It comes with a nice looking ui which makes creation of the pipes a simple process. These can then be saved, shared and output in either RSS, RDF, JSON or Atom formats.

It is still in beta at the time of writing but go have a look and play with the pipes others have created.

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The Apple v Cisco battle isn’t over yet.

Both companies have agreed to extend talks aimed at “reaching agreement on trademark rights and interoperability”.

Apple launched it’s iPhone last month in San Francisco and immediately Cisco sued Apple for trademark infringement of its own line of internet-enabled iPhones.

Cisco makes much of the hardware that underpins the internet, and has owned the trademark on the iPhone name since 2000 after it acquired another company Infogear.

However some believe their hold on it isn’t that strong due to the amount of time they held the trademark and how they only used it moments before Apple launched its version of an existing line products.

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Apparently the smell of the sea is more important than the cure for cancer!!

Scientists from the University of East Anglia have discovered exactly what makes the seaside smell like the seaside — and bottled it. The age-old mystery was unlocked thanks to some novel bacteria plucked from the North Norfolk coast.

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Well,? I first heard about it on one of the TWiT netcasts, but Apple have today posted the software that will unlock hardware that was fitted to Core 2 Duo-based Macs – well except the 1.83GHz 17in iMac but including the Mac Pro with an Airport Extreme add-in :s .

The hardware was installed in the machine but for reasons still unknown, Apple decided not to supply the necessary software until now.

Of course there is a catch and it will cost you, literally – $1.99 or £1.25 to allow you to use something you already have. Now Apple say this is due to accounting regulation that was brought in after the Enron scandal which is colloquially known as SOX.

I’m no accountant and those I’ve spoken to don’t seem to know how much truth is behind this either,? but it is such a nominal amount most will probably fork out for it anyway and why not?

Update:

Just seen this over at theregister.co.uk

It’s worth mentioning too that the update comes free with Apple’s new, 802.11n-compatible AirPort Extreme Base Station product, so don’t dash out and purchase the patch if you plan to buy this hardware in due course. Said access point hardware doesn’t ship until next month, for £119 in the UK and $179 in the US.

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The iPod shuffle just got that little bit more desirable…

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So what?! Should we all be rushing out to buy one or both of these products?

In short yes. Office particularly is a fantastic product and much improved over the previous versions; if you only buy one of these Microsoft Office 2007 should be it.

It has the brand new UI which makes things a lot easier and once you get to learn what is quite a radical departure from any other version of Office you will find doing even the most complex task easier.

So what do you get for your money below is a table from Microsofts site which goes though what each version contains.

Just one pitfall to look out for, as you will see the ‘Home and Student’ edition doesn’t come with Outlook which I don’t particularly agree with although Microsoft are probably only doing this so that users may pick up ‘Live Mail Desktop’ which is the replacement for ‘Outlook Express’.

So what about Vista? Well it got more of the attention rightly or wrongly, but should users be upgrading yet?

It isn’t an easy one to call, anyone getting a new PC should have no quibbles about upgrading, in fact I don’t think there will be much choice. For everyone else, I would say hold off until you upgrade. The improvements in Vista are great, it does look nice, it does things properly for a change but does that necessarily justify the expence of picking up a copy, not to mention the cost in possible hardware upgrade that you might need? I don’t think so. But don’t get me wrong Vista will run fine on a half decent PC that could run XP, you won’t get all the fancy stuff which some say is the main selling point but it will still run.

So what version of Vista should you get? The best guide on the product version is on the winsupersite.com where they have an in depth review which I’d suggest you read before doing anything.

Paul has also brought out a great book which goes into great detail about Vista and things it may take some of us a long time to figure out oddly enough called Windows Vista Secrets.

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