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Google Now, Lola may trump Siri - SFGate
With the launch of Siri last year, Apple underscored the potential for our devices to act as personal digital assistants, even if the company's marketing got a little ahead of the voice-recognition service's abilities. As the Cupertino tech giant prepares an upgrade for the next version of its mobile software, other organizations are also busy enhancing the abilities of computers to respond to and even anticipate our needs. In all cases, the firms are employing sophisticated artificial intelligence software that acts and communicates more like a human assistant (minus the occasional demand for a raise). At the Google I/O developer conference last week, the Mountain View company announced big improvements to the speed and accuracy of the voice search feature in the forthcoming version of its operating system for Android phones and tablets. Like Siri, this allows users to initiate searches or dictate texts or e-mails with their voice.
The Flashback malware affecting OS X systems has gained quite a bit of publicity since it was disclosed last week that over 600,000 Macs have been infected by the malware. Flashback began life last year as a trojan and has morphed into a drive-by download taking advantage of a vulnerability in Java that Apple did not patch until last week, despite Oracle having released patches for other systems back in February. Over the past few days, a few additional tidbits of information on Flashback have surfaced, including the arrival of some new tools to help users manage the threat.
Flashback Tidbits: Flashback Checker, OpenDNS Protection, Apple's Low-Visibility Security Team
All the Awesome Things You Can Do with a Long Press on Your iPhone, iPad, or iPad touch
Long pressing—that is, tapping and holding down on a part of your screen—provides a lot of handy shortcuts on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Here's a look at practically everything you can with this technique to save you a bunch of time typing and navigating your device. The video above will give you a demo of everything, but here's the text version for reference.
How to stop Facebook from sharing your location
(Credit: Screenshot by Sharon Vaknin/CNET ) Facebook is at it again, releasing yet another feature that I never had the opportunity to politely opt out of: location sharing. When Facebook decided to withdraw efforts from its short-lived check-in service, Places, it quickly implemented a more passive location-sharing feature that doesn't even have a name.Don’t limit yourself to just plugging in simple search terms to Google; check out this infographic and learn a search string search or two. You don’t need to limit yourself to searching just for simple strings; Google supports all manner of handy search tricks. If you want to search just HowToGeek.com’s archive of XBMC articles, for example, you can plug in site:howtogeek.com XBMC to search our site. Get More Out of Google [HackCollege via Mashable ]
Improve Your Google Search Skills [Infographic]
9 Strange Things About Tweets, Retweets And DMs Every Twitter User Must Know
Guest post by Dave Larson @TweetSmarter Oh Twitter, how can you be so simple and yet so complicated at the same time? When I joined Twitter in 2007, I thought it was an amazing way to connect with cool people around the world. And it was! In fact, I ended up spending so much time on Twitter, that it wasn’t long before I realized I had become an expert—an expert in making Twitter mistakes.
File syncing is a godsend when you work on multiple computers or devices and want to make sure you have the most up-to-date files wherever you log in. While online services like Dropbox may be the most convenient options, there are plenty of reasons you may want to "roll your own cloud" and sync your files to your own web server or just on your local network. Below, we'll detail how to set up a Dropbox clone, complete with instantaneous, encrypted syncs, cloud backups, and file versioning, using cross-platform software GoodSync . Why Set Up Your Own Syncing System? Control .
How to Set Up a File-Syncing Dropbox Clone You Control
In any given week, I get dozens of requests for help. The #1 question of 2011? It's no contest: "How do I protect myself online?" These days I'm getting that question in equal numbers from PC and Mac owners who are concerned about the best way to avoid being sucker-punched by social engineering attacks.
Stay safe online: 5 secrets every PC (and Mac) owner should know
Mining patterns in search data with Google Correlate
It all started with the flu. In 2008, we found that the activity of certain search terms are good indicators of actual flu activity. Based on this finding, we launched Google Flu Trends to provide timely estimates of flu activity in 28 countries. Since then, we’ve seen a number of other researchers—including our very own —use search activity data to estimate other real world activities.
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster ( @msuster ), a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners . Read more about Suster at his Startup Blog , BothSidesoftheTable. I have often said that what separates real entrepreneurs from pundits and bystanders is a bias towards getting things done versus over analyzing things. My credo has always been JFDI . It’s the hardest thing to teach people who come out of big companies, out of conservative jobs.
Startup Mantra: Hire Fast, Fire Fast
27 Tips for Complete Email Mastery
Email. We all have it. We all hate it. From Outlook to Gmail to the Great Email Beyond, here’s how to make the most of it. They say that the kids don’t use email that much these days. Doesn’t that sound dreamy?Startup Scrible is launching its rich web annotation tool to the public today. Scrible is also announcing that it has received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The service’s bookmarklet allows users to save and organize web pages and richly annotate articles with highlighters and sticky notes. You can also share annotated web pages with others. All of your saved web annocations are stored within your Scrible account and the startup will index this so your can search and filter through your saved content.
Scrible Launches Rich Web Annotation App To The Public
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Free Software University
Image by opensource.com Marrying technology, innovation, and this curious Internet thing of giving stuff away for free, consultant and Cong-base Englishman, Lloyd Hardy , is hoping to kick start an online learning revolution . Hardy proposes to deliver university courses for free over the internet using an “open source” model. Open source has revolutionised the delivery of technology since the late 1990s. Famous examples include the Linux operating system, the Firefox browser, the Apache web server and the OpenOffice suite. These and thousands of other products are available at the equally famous price of zero euro.10 iPad 2 apps for business
Image 1 of 11 The second generation of Apple's iPad tablet is thinner and lighter than its predecessor, with a more powerful dual-core processor boosting graphics and processing power. It also adds front- and rear-facing cameras - extending Apple's FaceTime videoconferencing feature to the iPad, as shown above.While it can perform many of the functions of a PC or Mac, Apple 's AAPL -2.08% iPad— including the new iPad 2—lacks two of the most common and frequently used features of a traditional computer. It has no standard USB port for connecting a flash drive or external hard disk, so you can't move files into and out of it from these devices. And it doesn't have a systemwide, user-accessible file system like those on traditional computers. The iPad lacks a USB port and can't accept a flash drive or external hard disk. So how do you get your files on it? Walt Mossberg gives a primer for retreiving Microsoft Office files or Adobe PDFs from a computer or cloud services.
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