Monthly Archive for June, 2007

Is It OK that Google Owns Us?

From eWeek:

Google’s continuously raked over the coals regarding the massive amounts of PII (personally identifiable information) it collects, what it does with it, how long it retains that data and what the company might do with it if its merger with DoubleClick goes ahead.

That’s all been ratcheted up to fever pitch over the past few weeks, with two new privacy headlines: complaints being voiced about Google’s new Street View service’s photographs getting too close for comfort and Privacy International’s having flunked Google on its privacy policies and procedures in a report published June 9.

The fury boils down to one question: whether or not it’s OK for Google to own us.

Kodak says camera sensor may eliminate flash

From Yahoo! News:

Eastman Kodak Co. said on Thursday it has developed digital camera technology that nearly eliminates the need for flash photography, part of the company’s effort to make money from its deep patent portfolio.

The world’s biggest maker of photographic film says its proprietary sensor technology significantly increases sensitivity to light. Image sensors act as a digital camera’s eyes by converting light into an electric charge to begin the capture process.

Kodak, which is in the last year of a lengthy and expensive transformation into a digital photography company as its film business shrinks, intends to lean on its wealth of intellectual property to boost its bottom line, expecting up to $250 million this year alone in royalties and related revenues.

Fathers and kids bond over video games

From Yahoo! News:

When Will Nickelson and his daughter want to spend some quality time together, they fire up Nintendo Co.’s Wii and play a few rounds of “Wii Sports” or “Mario Party 8.”

“It’s kind of difficult picking a game for a 7-year-old girl, but she really likes to beat her dad at bowling,” says Nickelson, 30, a stay-at-home dad from Huntsville, Ala.

He’s certainly not alone.

The generation that grew up with “Pac-Man” and “Pong” are now having children of their own. And across the nation, fathers and their kids are finding the virtual worlds of video games a popular place to bond.

Many fathers say the games bring them closer to their kids by providing a safe, convenient way to stay in touch and talk to their children on their own terms.

A national survey released last year by the Entertainment Software Association, a video game industry group, found that 35 percent of parents play video games, of which 80 percent play with their children. Mothers, too, were part of the study.

Total Defrag 2007

Paragon Software (the makers of Partition Manager) have released a new hard drive defragmentation utility called Total Defrag 2007. I received a press release with some of the details:

Paragon Software Group, the technological leader in innovative data security and data management technology, announced the release of Paragon Total Defrag 2007, the most advanced hard drive defragmentation utility available. Total Defrag 2007 promises to provide the most efficient disk layout possible, providing the user with faster boot times and fast access to files across the entire system.

The product is designed based on Paragon’s original technologies. Total Defrag 2007 will provide a complete and exhaustive defragmentation and disk optimization. In addition, users will be able to select options that will place the most frequently used OS files and data towards the beginning or outside tracks of the platters. This will result in even faster boot times and overall system performance.

“We believe that Paragon Total Defrag 2007 will outperform existing defrag utilities. Most of the defrag algorithms were developed during research into how fragmentation levels affect the size of a disk image,” said Konstantin Komarov, CEO of Paragon. “This technology is utilized in our other hard disk management products and now, as a stand-alone application.”

You can learn more on the Paragon Software web site.

Moleskinsoft Clone Remover 2.3

I received this press release the other day from Moleskinsoft:

Moleskinsoft today announces the release of version 2.3 of Moleskinsoft Clone Remover - an efficient utility designed to search for various duplicate files in your PC and delete unnecessary file copies. Moleskinsoft Clone Remover 2.3 finds duplicate files of different types, including music (mp3), image files, ZIP and RAR archives and others. The utility allows you to save time and efforts looking for similar files and deleting them. It will also help to free extra space on your PC and make it work faster. Recently one of the users of Moleskinsoft Clone Remover has informed us, that he managed to delete 150 GB of duplicate files! Isn’t that cool, or what?

Version 2.3 further expands the functionality of Moleskinsoft Clone Remover allowing user to discover and delete files of different types simultaneously, “all in one”, applying different methods of search for each type of files. Basically, Moleskinsoft Clone Remover employs five different ways to find duplicate files. First, the utility can find similar files with different names using search by content. For example, a file containing your photo may have different names and be located both in the “C:My picturesphotographies” and “D:Temporary files” folders. Then, search by mp3 tag is used for finding duplicate music files. This method is based on the fact that any mp3 file contains different information about the track. The utility compares tracks by artist, name, album, year, comment and genre. It can also compare several tags at a time. Search by properties method lets user find duplicate files by name and/or size. When the search for duplicate files is finished, the program will show a list of found files that can be deleted immediately. To make sure that the result is correct, it is possible to open the found files with some other program or view them with a built-in viewer. Besides that, duplicate pictures can be found with similar images method. It means that similar images are such images (jpg, bmp, png, psd and others) that differ in resolution. Or, they may have the same size, but one of the images has a small caption and the other does not. At last, Moleskinsoft Clone Remover searches for files with a zero size.

I haven’t tried the software, but it sounds promising. You can read more about Clone Remove and download a trial from the Moleskinsoft site.

Everything you want to know about Google PageRank

If you have a web site, then you want to be listed high in a search engine. Google uses a formula called PageRank that determines the quality of a page (and thus its ranking) based on the quality of the links that point to it. The formula seemed to be remarkable effective, and that’s why everyone uses Google. I’m sure that there are many other factors, but people have become obsessed with understanding PageRank with the hope that they will be able to increase their ranking.

Smashing Magazine has a lengthy article that tries to bring all of the known information together, with supporting links to sources and tools.

Everybody is using it, but (almost) nobody really knows how it works. Google PageRank is probably one of the most important algorithms ever developed for the Web. With billions of existing pages and millions of pages generated every day, the search issue in the Web is more complex than you probably think it is. PageRank, only one of hundreds of factors used by Google to determine best search results, helps to keep our search clean and efficient. But how is it actually done? How does Google PageRank work, which factors do have an impact on it and which don’t? And what do we really know about PageRank?

If you are into this sort of thing, you should definitely check it out.

Are Google’s moves creeping you out?

From ZDNet News:

One lazy afternoon, Maer Israel and a colleague ducked out of work to have a double espresso at a nearby cafe in San Francisco.

Several weeks later, the information technology manager at the French American International School was alerted that a picture of him sitting at the cafe could be found on Google’s online map as part of the search giant’s new street-level photo view.

“The HR manager ran into me in the hallway, and she pulled me aside and…said, ‘Do you know that there are cameras everywhere?’” Israel recounted. “Of course, I was a little freaked out because it’s the HR person telling me that we got busted having a coffee next door…My mother is surprised I haven’t been fired.”

Google’s recently unveiled Street View stunned many with its photos of the unsuspecting, from a man climbing a front gate to another walking out of a strip club, but it’s hardly the first time the company has compiled a massive database of material that some would want to remain private. Indeed, Google has for years been storing every Web search and analyzing the topics of Gmail so it can serve customers with related advertisements.

But now that Google is serving up images from the sky with Google Earth, creating street-level images with Street View and tracking customer behavior in cyberspace, some are starting to ask: how much is enough?

TestDisk - powerful cross-platform disk recovery tool

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I heard about this on Download Squad

The nightmare scenario: your computer won’t boot. The drive seems healthy otherwise; you can access it when booting from another drive, but for some reason your drive absolutely refuses to boot. Take heart, it’s possible that it can be fixed by TestDisk, a very powerful cross-platform partition recovery tool.

I haven’t tried it yet, but I wanted to pass the information along. You can read more about on the Download Squad site or on the CG Security site.

Note: CG Security is the maker of the PhotoRec software that Chris mentioned last summer.

YouTube to test video ID software

From BBC News:

Internet video site YouTube is to test a new video fingerprinting technology to address copyright concerns.

The software will identify unique attributes in video clips and could be used to prevent copyrighted clips from being uploaded without permission.

YouTube executive Chris Maxcy told news agency Reuters that the tool would be tested in a month’s time.

Breach of copyright has been an ongoing issue for the Google-owned video sharing site.

Doll Web Sites Drive Girls to Stay Home and Play

From the New York Times:

Presleigh Montemayor often gets home after a long day and spends some time with her family. Then she logs onto the Internet, leaving the real world and joining a virtual one. But the digital utopia of Second Life is not for her. Presleigh, who is 9 years old, prefers a Web site called Cartoon Doll Emporium.

Dress up dolls include Beyoncé Knowles, from Stardoll, and Rudolph Giuliani, from Cartoon Doll Emporium.

The site lets her chat with her friends and dress up virtual dolls, by placing blouses, hair styles and accessories on them. It beats playing with regular Barbies, said Presleigh, who lives near Dallas.

“With Barbie, if you want clothes, it costs money,” she said. “You can do it on the Internet for free.”