Posts Tagged ‘new york times’
Fighting PC Delays, Hourglass by Hourglass
From the New York Times:
Forget about desperate housewives. To witness true frustration, watch desperate PC users trying to type, send e-mail or work on a spreadsheet, only to be delayed by those pesky hourglass icons for seconds or even minutes until their computers finally respond.
Now Soluto, a company based in Tel Aviv, aims to help these PC owners with an unusual program intended to minimize irritating slowdowns. The software runs in the background on PCs, collecting data on delays in program responses and sending the information to company servers for analysis, said Tomer Dvir, a co-founder and the chief executive.
Bookmarklets
What’s a bookmarklet? Well, the Bookmarklets.com home page describes them in this way:
Bookmarklets are simple tools that extend the surf and search capabilities of Firefox and Explorer web browsers.
Bookmarklets are free.
Bookmarklets allow you to:
* Modify the way you see someone else’s webpage.
* Extract data from a webpage.
* Search more quickly, and in ways not possible with a search engine.
* Navigate in new ways.…and more. Over 150 bookmarklets are available.
Bookmarklets work on all platforms (Windows, Macintosh, Unix,…)
You do not have to download or install software to use Bookmarklets.
In the past I’ve used bookmarklets that have let me download YouTube videos, modify a New York Times article link so that I didn’t need to be logged in, and test a new Google search page before it was “live”. Essentially they are just little bits of javascript code that let you do something on a web page. Check out the Bookmarklet.com web site for a listing of what they have available.
Sure, It’s Big. But Is That Bad?
From the New York Times:
…Almost a decade after Google promised that the creed “Don’t be evil” would guide its activities, the federal government is examining Google’s acquisitions and actions as never before, looking for indications that the company’s market power may be anticompetitive in the worlds of Web search and online advertising…
G.E.’s Breakthrough Can Put 100 DVDs on a Disc
From the New York Times:
General Electric says it has achieved a breakthrough in digital storage technology that will allow standard-size discs to hold the equivalent of 100 DVDs.
The storage advance, which G.E. is announcing on Monday, is just a laboratory success at this stage. The new technology must be made to work in products that can be mass-produced at affordable prices.
But optical storage experts and industry analysts who were told of the development said it held the promise of being a big step forward in digital storage with a wide range of potential uses in commercial, scientific and consumer markets.
“This could be the next generation of low-cost storage,” said Richard Doherty, an analyst at Envisioneering, a technology research firm.