From fragile early wax recordings to today’s podcasts, the nation’s audio heritage is at peril, a report from the Library of Congress has concluded. The report, an outgrowth of a 2000 law mandating the Library of Congress to put together a national media preservation plan, found that efforts to preserve sound recordings are a haphazard [...]
A study conducted jointly by Penn State University, Duke University and Intel Labs has found that some Android apps surreptitiously send user information to remote servers at ad networks and analytics firms. Some of the apps send users’ geographic locations to remote ad networks; others send a unique hardware identifier and, in some cases, the [...]
Google CEO Eric Schmidt sees mobile devices augmenting our human existence in the future. Speaking at the TechCrunch Disrupt event this week, he outlined a vision in which mobile phones will autonomously conduct searches for us, and we’ll never be lonely or bored because we’ll always be able to get in touch with friends or [...]
Ever since the recent OpenSolaris and Java lawsuit incidents, Oracle has not been high on most FOSS aficionados’ lists of favorite companies. So when the company announced earlier this month that it was abandoning RHEL in favor of its own, homemade Linux kernel — the “Unbreakable” Linux Kernel — it wasn’t surprising that the skepticism [...]
To me, the ideal reminder application is aggressive, rude, and above all persistent. I want something that makes some kind of grand entrance when the moment arrives — a noise, a buzz, an obnoxious interruption. And I don’t want something that meekly backs off and forgets about the task I gave it after I tell [...]
There are 10 basic principles that can have a substantial influence on the successful implementation of a large IT transformation program. These recommendations, or “10 Commandments,” will help direct energies toward the most fundamental aspects of program management. First, the Program Management Office must be independent of business and IT delivery teams with full-time empowered [...]
The many laws enacted by states to ban texting while driving appear to be for naught, suggest findings from a new study by the Highway Loss Data Institute. It found no reductions in crashes after these laws took effect. In fact, the bans were associated with a slight increase in the frequency of auto insurance [...]
By all accounts, cloud computing is the future. The market will grow at five times the rate of traditional IT products, IDC has predicted, estimating it will be worth $55.5 billion by 2014. While the future should be rosy, some policy groups are warning that without proper protections, the sector could stumble hard. [...]
By all accounts, cloud computing is the future. The market will grow at five times the rate of traditional IT products, IDC has predicted, estimating it will be worth $55.5 billion by 2014. While the future should be rosy, some policy groups are warning that without proper protections, the sector could stumble hard. [...]
One of the best productivity tools I had when I used Microsoft Windows was a collection of portable applications. I missed those tools when I migrated to Linux. Now several open source projects could make portable apps available to mainstream Linux users. Three websites are trying to create that functionality. But the efforts might need [...]