Software – Page 3

Bill C-32 and digital locks

June 8, 2010 Doug Groves bill C-32, copyright, digital locks, DMCA, DRM, Michael Geist, privacy1 Comment

When the Canadian government put forth it’s new copyright bill last week there were few surprises. The new bill still supports making circumvention of digital locks illegal, thereby negating many of the fair dealing provisions allowed for in the Conservative’s ‘new and improved’ version of bill C-61. Support for freeing up the DRM section of bill C-32 has been growing since it’s announcement. Besides the large swath of consumers opposed to DRM’ed content, groups such as The Canadian Booksellers Association and the Retail Council of Canada are saying “some parts…

The fastest browser on Earth

May 28, 2010May 28, 2010 drsquid browser, Chrome, Firefox, google, opera, parody, share, video0 comment

Opera, the 5th placed browser, released this funny video yesterday that parodies the Google Chrome speed test videos. Opera’s usage share of web browsers has held steady at approximately 2% since it came out. However, since its release in 2008, Chromes’ share has rapidly grown, at Firefox’s expense. I am sure Opera is hoping that this video will persuade other dissatisfied Firefox users to make the switch to them instead.

Google launches open source, royalty free WebM video

May 19, 2010 Doug Groves Flash, google, Google I/O, Matroska, Ogg, On2, VP8, WebM0 comment

Although Google’s plans to release an open-source video codec was widely discussed in the tech community for some time, the big G has made it official. Google’s acquisition of On2 and their video codec has become WebM. According to the announcement during Google I/O conference, WebM is a container based on the popular Matroska, with VP8 video and Ogg audio streams packaged inside. What makes WebM compelling is that Google has decided to make it both open source and royalty free, which could set it up to be the HTML5…

The Onion spoofs Google Mobile Ads: Genius!

May 18, 2010May 19, 2010 drsquid advertising, google, Nexus 1, Onion, onion news network, ONN, parody, satire, spoof, video0 comment

Will this actually become reality? Well according to this rumour, the video above isn’t that far fetched!

Windows Media Center in HDTVs, Xbox Live TV around the corner… dare I say “synergy”?

April 29, 2010April 30, 2010 Doug Groves Microsoft, Windows 7, Windows 7 Embedded, Windows Media Center, Xbox 360, Zune Marketplace, Zune Pass3 Comments

Microsoft has talked in the past of making the Xbox 360 an ‘all-in-one’ set top device, capable of providing DVR and TV capabilities, but little substance has come from it. Now, Game Focus is reporting that according to their own trusted source, that an Xbox live TV service will be coming to both the US and Canada by 2011, and that this would work in conjunction with a major telecommunications company, which narrows it down to basically Rogers or Bell. Users will have access to live TV feeds, recording capabilities…

Microsoft releases Vail Server public preview

April 28, 2010April 28, 2010 Doug Groves Microsoft, public preview, Server 2008, Vail, WHS, Windows Home Server1 Comment

On Monday, Microsoft released the public preview of of the latest home server, codenamed Vail. Interestingly, they’ve dropped the word “Home” from the naming convention, which goes in line with the rumours that they may also be targeting this software for very small businesses as well. You can get yourself a copy to try out here. There’s a lot of new features in Vail. The two major changes are significant. On the surface, the UI has been given the Windows 7 treatment, and at the heart of it, Vail is…

Adobe’s Flash: Good, Bad or Just Ugly?

April 20, 2010November 6, 2020 Jason Adobe, Apple, Flash, iPad, iPhone, programming3 Comments

I have a few beefs with Flash… its security sandbox seems more restrictive than helpful. Most Flash vulnerabilities have something to do with null pointer exceptions rather than what programmers write, which one could point at and say “ah HA! Flash is bad!”. But when you think about it, what software doesn’t have security vulnerabilities? I mean, Apple recently dealt with a vulnerability that lets would-be hackers send an SMS that allows them to eaves drop on conversations and make your iPhone part of a botnet. Where was the outrage…

Google channels Dr.Dolittle – introduces Translate for Animals

April 1, 2010 drsquid Android, animals, google, translate2 Comments

Once again Google leads the way in revolutionizing how we communicate – now we can finally talk to our pets… If we could talk to the animals, just imagine it Chatting to a chimp in chimpanzee Imagine talking to a tiger, chatting to a cheetah What a neat achievement that would be. More info, including the QR code to download this to your Android phone, can be found here

New Photoshop features get demoed, drooled over

March 25, 2010March 29, 2010 Danny X Adobe, Adobe Photoshop, CS4, Photoshop, video1 Comment

Adobe has released a video showing one of its new features, the “Content Aware Fill” tool. Similar to the Healing Brush tool, Content Aware allows users to paint over parts of an image to a point that they appear to have never existed at all. The video above shows this impressive new feature in a variety of common uses, but the most impressive one is hands-down the last one, in which the user fills in the missing parts of a photograph from absolute nothingness. The Content Aware tool is billed…

Chrome OS due out by end of 2010

March 12, 2010March 12, 2010 Doug Groves chrome os, editorial, google, netbooks0 comment

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, while speaking at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit, announced that Google’s Chrome OS is still under construction, and on track to be released in the second half of this year. Chrome OS is a lightweight Linux based OS that uses the Google Chrome web browser as the main interface, and is geared towards lower end computing, such as netbooks and devices that make use of the mobile-geared ARM processors.. When Google announced Chrome, I admit that I was a little skeptical largely based on the usability…

OpenGL 4.0 is here and ready to compute

March 11, 2010 Doug Groves 0 comment

Announced today at the 2010 Games Developers Conference, the latest version of OpenGL is available to developers for use. A cross-platform system for rendering graphics, OpenGL and it’s variants, such as OpenGL|ES for mobile devices, basically deliver the 3D goods on just about any platform. OpenGL 4.0 builds on past iterations, offloading more geometry and lighting tasks to the graphics processor. One of the biggest impacts that end users will see is battery life on mobile devices such as smartphones and notebook computers when using 3D applications. Normally ‘3D applications’ would mean…

Full 3D gaming on Microsoft’s Windows Phone demoed

March 10, 2010March 10, 2010 Doug Groves Microsoft, Visual Studio, Windows Phone, WP7S, Xbox, XNA5 Comments

Engadget managed to get a hands on of a couple of Windows Phone 7 games built with XNA Game Studio 4.0. Although they weren’t allowed to take any video of the games in action, they said it did work, including unlocking achievements. The more impressive of the two was a top down sci-fi looking dungeon crawler called The Harvest, running at the full 800×480 Windows Phone 7 resolution. The other is called Battle Punks and is a one-on-one fighting game. Although there’s no in-game action of either, they did post…