Archive for: November 19, 2009
November 19, 2009
Windows Home Server Power Pack 3 will be available on November 24 in all shipping languages, Microsoft announced Thursday.
Users must have Power Pack 2 installed on their Home Server and Power Pack 3 will automatically install as a Windows update.
Microsoft unveiled the Power Pack 3 beta in July, a few months after the premiere of Power Pack 2.
New features include backup and restore of computers running Windows 7, Windows 7 Libraries integration, enhancements for Windows Media Center, and better support for netbook computers.
As a result, when you install WHS connector and log on to a Windows 7 computer, you can access WHS shared folders from Win7 libraries. You can also suppress Action Center warnings about Windows backup and schedule your computer to wake up at a specific time for backup.
PP3 will also automatically archive recorded TV by moving them from Windows Media Center to your home server, and allow users to view information about a home server's storage space, backup status, and more from Windows Media Center.
More details are available in the support documentation.
    
The Verizon ads that take aim at AT&T's 3G network will stay on the air -- for now. A judge on Wednesday denied AT&T's request to remove the Verizon commercials while the two sides battle it out in court.
Earlier this month, AT&T sued Verizon in Georgia district court for what AT&T considers to be false and misleading advertisements. A week later, AT&T asked for a temporary restraining order that would ban Verizon from running the offending ads.
Several commercials show Verizon customers using their phones while full, 3G coverage maps follows behind them. They then flash to an AT&T customer, who is followed by a 3G map with spotty coverage. "If you want to know why some people have spotty 3G coverage, there's a map for that," the narrator says in one of the ads.
AT&T claims that the ads suggest that customers not connected to its 3G network cannot make or receive calls at all, when in fact they are just bumped down to the 2G network and can still operate their phones.
In the meantime, AT&T has hit back with its own TV commercial, starring actor Luke Wilson (above).
Get the rest of this story on pcmag.com.
 
 Stop the presses. Twitter has decided to change its greeting from "What are you doing?" to "What's happening?"
"The fundamentally open model of Twitter created a new kind of information network and it has long outgrown the concept of personal status updates," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in a blog post. "Twitter helps you share and discover what's happening now among all the things, people, and events you care about. 'What are you doing?' isn't the right question anymore -- starting today, we've shortened it by two characters. Twitter now asks, 'What's happening?'"
Twitter discovered that its users were not just providing real-time updates on their whereabouts or activities, but random commentary on things they had seen, read, watched, or mused about.
"People are witnessing accidents, organizing events, sharing links, breaking news, reporting stuff their dad says, and so much more," Stone said.
Hopefully not too many accidents ...
 
In addition to rolling out its Chrome OS code, Google on Thursday also unveiled automatic captions and timing for YouTube.
Automatic captions will use the speech-to-text algorithms currently used in Google Voice to produce captions for a selected video. These captions can also be translated into other languages. Auto timing, meanwhile, allows users to add manually created captions to YouTube.
Automatic captions are available on some education channels and most Google channels at this point, but will soon be expanded. Automatic timing is available now for all new video uploads.
For auto timing, simply upload a text transcript - no time codes required - and Google will do the rest of the work. See the video above for a more detailed step-by-step.
 
Google released the code for its Chrome operating system on Thursday, and announced plans for a Chrome OS-based netbook before the 2010 holiday season.
Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management at Google, hosted a technical preview at the company's Mountain View headquarters, where he demoed an early version of the upcoming OS and provided details on how consumers can get their hands on a Chrome OS device. Chrome OS will initially be featured exclusively in netbooks, and is "primarily intended for connectivity," Pichai said. Basically, if you don't plan to use the Web, Chrome OS is not for you.
Chrome OS is entirely cloud-based ,and every move you make on the system will sync up with Google's servers. Lose or break your Chrome OS netbook? Buy a new one, log in, and all your data will be pulled from the cloud and load exactly like you had it on your previous machine.
Pichai did not have details about pricing, but said it would be in line with what other netbooks cost. Hardware partners will be released in mid-2010.
More details about the demo and what's under the hood can be found at pcmag.com. Screen shots of the new OS after the jump.
In its current form, Chrome OS has an apps tab on the top, left-hand corner. Click it and you'll see a drop-down menu of apps the user has selected.
Chrome OS looks very similar to the Chrome browser.
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Certain apps will show up as pop-up, persistent panels or "moles" -- they will not disappear if you click on the browser in the background, but can be minimized. Examples ...
The Parents Television Council is pleased with Microsoft's recent decision to pull its sponsorship of Fox's Family Guy Presents: Seth and Alex's Almost Live Comedy Show over content concerns, but the group doesn't think the software giant has gone far enough. During Microsoft's annual board meeting this week, the PTC asked the company to go even further, by discontinuing its sponsorship of all programming from Family Guy creator, Seth MacFarlane.
The organization's national grassroots director, Gavin McKiernan, delivered a speech to the board stating, "Mr. MacFarlane's Family Guy has consistently presented excessively violent, graphically sexual and profane material. The lead in and lead out of the Seth MacFarlane special were both Family Guy episodes supported by Windows 7."
McKiernan went on to highlight some of the content the organization has taken issue with:
In addition to explicit sexual humor and profanity, Family Guy promotes disrespect and violence toward women. In a typical episode from March 15th of this year, the Stewie character made comments such as, 'I'm going to slit your throat in your sleep,' as well as, 'I was wondering if you could give me some advice on how to murder a woman and get away with it.' A fist fight breaks out and doesn't end until innocent bystander Lois, Stewie's mother, is socked in the face. Microsoft also sponsored this episode.
MacFarlane is behind a number of Fox programs, a list that also includes The Cleveland Show and American Dad.
 
 I finally own a Blu-ray DVD player, which I quite like, but Istill can't warm up to internet-enabled BD-Live feature. Sounds like I'm not the only one.
Despite the fact that Sony has sold 14 million Blu-ray players worldwide, the average weekly sign-in for the BD-live service is, in the US, between 75,000 and 100,000 users. The numbers come from Sony's Rich Marty, VP of New Business Development for Sony Pictures. Marty told me during a recent Sony Blu-ray Experience event that the number includes a lot of return users.
I noted the disparity between units sold and log-in numbers, but Sony execs contend that BD-Live is really a "complimentary component," and Sony understands that it won't get everyone to connect. In fact, that's not even the goal. Marty added that by year's end, there'll be rough 150 Sony Blu-Ray movie titles featuring BD-Live.
At the event, Sony execs showed off interactive features for the movie "District 9" and a recipe-access app for "Julia and Julia". The marriage between Sony's movie content and its hardware seems like a good one, but I wondered how successful Sony has been at encouraging other studios to include BD-Live features. Chris Fawcett, VP for Sony's Home Audio and video Group, said Sony is seeing more activity, but he is further encouraged by the business the post production community is seeing for more and more BD-Live feature requests.
I like what Sony showed me, such as Movie IQ, which presents IMDB-style movie information while you watch the film, but I don't know if that will get me to start using my Blu-ray player's Internet connection for more than Netflix streaming movies and firmware updates.
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 Yahoo has decided to sunset its excellent, if now irrelevant, Yahoo Go mobile app. Originally launched in 2006 for the Nokia 6682 smartphone, Yahoo Go has seen three major releases across Windows Mobile and Symbian handsets. Yahoo Go offered much of what's popular on today's smartphones, including consolidated access to e-mail, search, news, sports, and weather, before other smartphone vendors caught on (besides Palm, at the time). Today, Yahoo Go makes less sense. The writing was already on the wall when Yahoo revamped its mobile strategy several times during the past two years.
 
 SOS Online Backup, PCMag's Editor's Choice for online backup, today increased its lead in innovations over the competition by being the first to come out with an iPhone app. The market share leaders in the space, Mozy and Carbonite, have yet to make a similar announcement. The app not only lets you download files you've placed in your online backup set to the mobile device, but you can also share those files with other users via the app. Note that it's not for uploading and backing up stuff on your iPhone, but for viewing and sharing what you've uploaded from your PC.
I was able to get at my backed up files from a couple of years ago, and could easily view a photo I had stored up there. The app automatically launched Safari for said viewing, which worked quickly and flawlessly. I also shared a stored file to an email address, and the recipient was able to download the file without having to sign up for an SOS account.
"Online backup as a service is growing and evolving into a more complex offering," said Ken Shaw, Chief Technology Officer of SOS Online Backup. "Online backup is not just backing up your data offsite anymore. The trend in the industry is growing towards offering value added services such as management, access and sharing capabilities in addition to online backup."
These capabilities are evaluated at length in my review of SOS Online Backup at PCMag.com. The iPhone app only extends SOS's impressive feature set detailed there.
"These days the traditional idea of 'going to work' has transformed from being strapped to a desk into being able to access your network 24/7 through mobile devices. With more and more ...
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Microsoft on Wednesday launched a public beta of 
