Sony officially launched its PlayStation Vita handheld gaming console in the United States on Wednesday, a week after it was made available online in a premium bundle. The WiFi-only version of the console is available at $250; the 3G/WiFi version goes for $300. Several games have been made available, and Sony on Wednesday added apps for Netflix, Flickr and LiveTweet to the mix. The apps are available at no charge. There have been questions about the PS Vita’s future, as critics contend that it’s arrived in a market that’s already spiraling downward.
If you spend endless hours at a keyboard crunching words, avoiding distractions is essential. Sometimes, the worst offender in causing distractions comes from all the bells and whistles in the word processor itself. That is where WordGrinder comes to the rescue. In today’s Linux world of GUI-filled desktops, using a text editor that runs within a terminal window may seem like a big step backward. It did not take me very long to discover that writing with WordGrinder is actually a big step in a better direction.
Quite a lot has been written about the importance of due-diligence in a cloud environment. Sometimes the importance of security and compliance-related vetting in the cloud is easy to justify, like when you’re evaluating off-premise public cloud hosted at a new service provider. Other times, executives might take some convincing, like when you’re talking about an internally maintained private cloud, before they see the value. Either way though, most organizations that have gone through a cloud deployment have probably put some level of effort into due diligence.
Google is tracking users of the Internet Explorer Web browser without their knowledge, Microsoft has asserted. After news emerged last week that Google had bypassed the privacy settings of Apple’s Safari browser, Microsoft researchers began looking into whether the search giant was also playing fast and loose with IE’s settings. However, IE 9 has an additional privacy feature called “Tracking Protection” that blocks the method Google is using, Microsoft said. Users without IE 9 or who have the feature turned off may be susceptible.
The United States National Security Agency has cautioned that the Anonymous hacker community might be able to cause a limited power outage through a cyberattack, according to a recent report. NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander has warned of the potential attack during meetings at the White House and in other private sessions, according to the report. However, he expects Anonymous to need one to two years to develop this capability. “The one-to-two-year timeframe does not make sense to me,” Darren Hayes, CIS program chair at Pace University, told TechNewsWorld.
The U.S. Department of Transportation has proposed guidelines that advise automakers to disable certain in-vehicle electronic features. The DOT wants to crack down on any action that requires drivers to give the task more than a two-second single glance, or 20 seconds of total glance time, to control. The suggestions encouraged automakers to make sure that certain in-vehicle electronics wouldn’t be used while the vehicle was in motion. Many actions that would force a driver to visually and manually enter data would be disabled under the proposed guidelines.
The U.S. Department of Transportation has proposed guidelines that advise automakers to disable certain in-vehicle electronic features. The DOT wants to crack down on any action that requires drivers to give the task more than a two-second single glance, or 20 seconds of total glance time, to control. The suggestions encouraged automakers to make sure that certain in-vehicle electronics wouldn’t be used while the vehicle was in motion. Many actions that would force a driver to visually and manually enter data would be disabled under the proposed guidelines.
Google’s privacy practices came under fire again last week for undermining the privacy practices of someone else. Namely, Apple. Apple is one of the few browser makers that turns off by default a website’s ability to push third-party cookies to a Web surfer. Cookies can perform a valuable service to users. If you want your home page on Google to be laid out in a certain way every time you land on it, for example, a cookie for the site does that for you. However, cookies can also be used to track where you go on the Web and feed that info back to third-party marketers.
Last week, Cisco raised an objection to the Microsoft acquisition of Skype, saying it would hurt video conferencing interoperability — even though, in this space, you could argue Cisco is not the poster child for interoperability. Coincidently, I met with the CEO of LifeSize, and he saw this Microsoft acquisition as a huge opportunity. LifeSize is the poster child for video-conferencing interoperability. So why would Cisco complain about a move and highlight something it doesn’t do as a reason to block it, while LifeSize would applaud the same move?
A regional court in Munich, Germany, has ruled that most of Motorola Mobility’s smartphone products infringe on Apple’s slide-to-unlock image patent. Users of Apple’s iOS devices slide a virtual button across the screen in order to “unlock” the device — in other words, wake it up and make it ready to accept other input. It’s meant to prevent so-called pocket dials on the device’s touch-sensitive screen. Users have the option to use a four-digit PIN for added security. However, it seems Motorola’s use of the slide-to-unlock idea was too similar to Apple’s.
