[SoftRatty] tag: reason

Window Pong turns your browser into a game

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 03:57:00 +0000

If, for some reason, you've been missing out on a reason not to use your browser's pop-up blocker, here's a new one: Window Pong. The age old game of Pong comes to your browser using separate pop-up windows. You play against a computer that volleys back yet another window that acts as the ball--complete with sound effects. Meanwhile, a fourth window at the top of the screen keeps score of the ordeal, giving the first player to reach five points the win.

Is it practical? No. Is it a great use of JavaScript? Definitely.

I found it to be unplayable on my laptop's track pad, but had slightly better luck with my mouse. If you're looking for a more precise experience, worth checking out is sister project Snake, which emulates the age-old arcade classic popularized by Nokia phones. Better yet, you get to use your arrow keys instead of a mouse.

Both sites were created by Amsterdam-based interface designer Sylvain Vriens as a part of Project-Euh.com, a small collection of interactive Web games and technology demos.

(via Reddit)

Those aren't just random windows, they're paddles and a ball to play the classic arcade game Pong.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Apple readying its Greensboro Store: Is it expensive at $1.7 million?

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 20:49:19 +0000

Apple’s speeding up the opening of its Greensboro Store and while Apple does keeps itself busy there are reports of some quarrel shaping up. The reason that has so far shaped up is; the has been some sort of argument, whether the place is even worth Apple? The property owners have been targeted as the entire cost has touched $1.7 million, more than the $1.6 million Apple invests per store. The argument may bear no fruit now as the store is getting geared up to launch by this Christmas (hopefully).

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Browser Head to Head: Chrome vs Firefox vs Flock

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 17:05:39 +0000

Chris Snyder is an online journalist specializing in new media. He writes about the tech biz for Wired.com’s Epicenter blog.

It’s a long road to a victory in the browser wars. Just ask Firefox. The open source browser which launched in 2004 just cracked the 20 percent threshold of the market share for November, according to Net Applications, pushing it a step closer but still miles away from IE.

Recently a few new players have also thrown their hats in the ring, including Google with its much-hyped Chrome and the lesser known, Mozilla-based social web browser Flock, which released its 2.0 version this past October. But do these newcomers even stand a chance?

The Basics

Firefox is gaining ground for good reason: it’s simple, reliable and secure. Its tabbed browsing led to a similar remodel in IE and it has a slew of add-ons that give it a leg up over the competition. It’s slowly becoming the new standard with a steady audience, and that will be hard to beat anytime soon. And its open source platform leaves room for alternatives and experimental niche browsers like Flock.

Flock 2.0 is basically a Firefox with a lot of perks and pre-installed add-ons for those heavy into social networking. Think of it as a FriendFeed of the browser world, which brings all of your friends from 23 various networks together in a sidebar. It is also one of the first browsers to incorporate media feeds for photos and videos. Flock is all about sharing what you find on the web as you surf, and it allows you to accomplish this pretty easily by dragging and dropping them either into an email or onto a friend.

Chrome is the polar opposite of Flock, and its big advantage is that it’s even simpler than Firefox, or any other browser out there right now. The search bar is also integrated into the address bar, which seems to be the wave of the future, at least for those who swear by Google search and don’t need any bells and whistles. Unfortunately, Chrome’s only available for PCs at the moment.

Usability

Chrome wins hands down on getting the job done. It’s quick and painless with a clear focus of searching for information using Google’s engine. Dynamic tabbed browsing is a staple now, and if anything crashes, only that tab will go down, not your entire session, which is nice. But if you want a richer web browsing experience stick with Firefox or Flock. There’s also no easy way to subscribe to RSS feeds from the search bar as there is with Firefox.

Flock can feel a bit overwhelming at times with all of the sidebars of information, but once you get everything set up and get the hang of it, it’s pretty convenient and preferable to keeping a million tabs open for sites like Twitter and Facebook. The drag and drop interface is great. When you just want to email a YouTube video or picture it’s much easier than copying any URLs, although it does also seem a bit too easy to share something that you might not want shared.

The only other problem with the social networks is that you can’t really fit all of that functionality into a sidebar. It’s a good way of consolidating friends, but it’s more like a giant address book than anything else. Simple things like posting tweets are a bit confusing, with no clear box for entering in text. When a friend adds content, however, it will open up the profile in the main browser in full view, so you still need to go back to the source.

Speed

Despite the extra features, Flock is surprisingly just as fast as Chrome or Firefox, at least on a medium grade PC. Looks like they’ve improved upon this concern in the latest release. And Chrome seems to have Firefox beat in this category but the difference isn’t anything drastic.

Privacy

Incognito — aka “porn mode” – is the new way to surf, as every browser is picking up on this private surfing option that Safari first initiated.

Chrome has faced some privacy concerns at launch with its Omnibox monitoring and recording too much information, but this can all be prevented by changing the default settings and going Incognito.

Expandability

Chrome doesn’t support any extensions or add-ons yet, so Firefox still dominates in this area. But if you are looking for simple, you probably don’t want much more than Chrome already offers.

Final Thoughts

Firefox is here to stay, but there will always be a long tail of niche alternatives like Chrome and Flock. When Chrome moves into Mac realm it could pick up some market share from Safari. Flock will be there for social network junkies who want to try something new, but the first step to making Flock mainstream will be for more of the social networks themselves to go mainstream. Twitter is on track, but still has a long way to go before it’s a household name. If you’re only on Facebook or MySpace, you probably don’t need to worry about the extra sidebars and features.

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Yahoo's New CEO Should Be David Rosenblatt (YHOO)

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:50:00 +0000

After three rounds of polling the results are in: Readers say Yahoo (YHOO) should hire David Rosenblatt for its next CEO.

Rosenblatt is the guy who cut costs while building revenues at DoubleClick before selling it to Google (GOOG) for $3.1 billion. He beat out Google's head of sales Tim Armstrong and former AOL CEO Jon Miller in our final round of voting.

We haven't heard from Rosenblatt about whether he'd even take the job, but we decided to collect recommendations to send to Yahoo's board anyway.

We started with another former CEO of DoubleClick, cofounder Kevin Ryan, who also happens to work in our office as SAI chairman. Kevin loves the idea of Rosenblatt-run Yahoo. He gave us five reasons why:

He's experienced. Rosenblatt successfully managed an Internet company with more than 1,000 employees.
He owns the niche. DoubleClick wasn't just a tech company and it wasn't just an advertising company. It was both -- like Yahoo.
He can cut and grow Yahoo at the same time. At DoubleClick, Rosenblatt cut headcount from 2,000 to 1,000 between 2001 and 2003.
He can cut and grow. While selling off businesses DoubleClick needed to get out of, Rosenblatt managed to increase its revenues anyway.
He's new. Yahoo needs someone who isn't responsible -- and isn't interested in defending -- past decisions.

Current DoubleClick/Google employees crush on Rosenblatt, too. One told me: "There is nothing not to love about him. [Rosenblatt taking the Yahoo CEO gig] would be great for him. Huge loss for us."

A few readers told us why they chose Rosenblatt:

David Rosenblatt is a incredibly smart and an amazing manager; he turned Doubleclick around and was behind the entire sale to Google. He is far and away the best man for the job. Yahoo would be crazy to let him get away...

Rosenblatt's banking connections prob facilitate another deal with MSFT quickly.

DR!!! Worked for him. Smart guy, understands the business and surrounds himself with strong people.

David R. Thats what people at DCLK call him. A great CEO worked with him, even played basketball with him (he was part of the DCLK b'ball team) in the league in nyc. A great competitor.

One reader composed a list of ten reason while Rosenblatt will get the job:

Turned around DoubleClick as CEO, gave it a rebirth and sold to Google for 5x in less than 2 years
Unlike the AOL guys, has had a history of success in the online business-- success follows people and breeds more success...
Is not a homegrown, loyal Google guy like [Tim Armstrong] and would probably leave
Has seen the insides of Google, whose organization is most likely factorial worse than Yahoo only masked by the 1 phenomenal revenue stream
Probably made 95% of his DCLK acquisition money already-- time to diversify!
As President of Display, he will always be the step child to the search guys [at Google]
Is highly ethical
Is a technologist who gets the advertising space, exactly what Yahoo! needs with its open strategy and apt platform
Is smart-- street smarts combined with cognitive intelligences (Yale and Stanford MBA)
Is respected in the industry-- advertisers, publishers, agencies AND investors.

See Also:
Everyone's Pick For Yahoo CEO

Trutap trying to keep afloat, to slash 80% staff

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 12:12:47 +0000

Trutap, the free mobile social network - video demo from Trutap on Vimeo.

At times like these when every penny matters, Trutap has decided to cut short 80% of its workforce. The reason being its failure to secure second round of funding. There has been no concrete statement from the company in this regard but sources report that it’s serious about slashing out costs so they can continue providing their service. The question here is who are they going to keep out of their team of 30 people? And who will invest in the service so that it continues further and not succumb to these troubling times.

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Extra Antivir

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 11:40:08 +0000

Description of Extra Antivir and consequences of its residing on your PC

Extra Antivir 2.8 cannot deliver your PC from viruses and comprises viruses itself. This program has been concocted to make money from the air; well-studied though very popular trickery is used by people promoting Extra Antivir. Essential part of this trickery is a trialware. Saying that one needs to remove Extra Antivir experts usually have in mind to remove Extra Antivir trialware.
It does not mean, however, that there is no danger that comes from registered version and it is at least safe to let full version of Extra Antivir run free at your PC. Viruses included into Extra Antivir are just blocked by dll files which user receives after registration of Extra Antivir trialware, but such disabling is usually ineffective as it leads to system freezes and finally disorders hosting computer.
The trailware acts as adware, i.e. in practice it means that Extra Antivir is configured to start each time when user logs on to Windows and asks through scans and alerts to resister this copy as it is necessary to remove the threats exposed by Extra Antivir. In reality, all so called threats emanate from the strong desire of hackers to possess several bucks from each user while the real challenge to your computer safety and privacy is Extra Antivir. Click here to start scanning computer free of charge and get rid of Extra Antivir.

Extra Antivir Technical Details

Full name: Extra Antivir 2.8, ExtraAntivir 2.8
Version: 2,8
Type: Rogue anti-spyware
Origin: Russian Federation

Extra Antivir Screenshot (click to enlarge):

Signs of being infected with Extra Antivir:

Extra Antivir, as a rule, starts to run simultaneously with Windows and shows you a pop-up with various active objects; the most important of them are free scan and registration options. It is thus hard to pay no attention to the presence of Extra Antivir when such pop-up is entitled “ExtraAntivir 2.8”. It may happen that pop-up fails to appear due to some circumstances, especially in case of shadowed installation and especially when it was a trojan that serves many malware that in this case installed Extra Antivir, because short version of Extra Antivir might be installed in such a case. If you have not seen any window entitled Extra Antivir, but there have been pop-ups and alerts invoking to resolve all your problems with security by installing certain software from Internet, or if your PC simply behaves in a strange manner, this could also be a reason to remove Extra Antivir; click here to identify malware and viruses at your PC and get rid of Extra Antivir and/or other dangerous residents found.

Automatic Removal of Extra Antivir from your PC:

Extra Antivir is not an orphan as there are RapidAntivirus and related malware items (all fake virus remover), which, speaking metaphorically, gave birth to ExtraAntivir, still active. They share same trojans and webs-sites with malicious scripts, also may be installed together at one PC. It is hard to predict whether Extra Antivir removal is the only one malware removal operation needed for total system cleanup. When you remove Extra Antivir in automatic mode, there is a warranty that other rogues detected and removed. Follow the link below to get rid of Extra Antivir in a way that provides total system cleanup.

Download Extra Antivir Removal Tool

Manual Removal of Extra Antivir:

Be attentive removing Extra Antivir manually, especially when deleting Registry values. Any mistyping usually results in failure to remove Extra Antivir. Reboot PC before and after Extra Antivir manual removal. The right way to get rid of Extra Antivir would include reboot of operating system to ensure every problem is not active while Extra Antivir removal is in progress.

Remove Extra Antivir files and dll’s

install_511_MHwzNnwxMDAwMDAwMDAwfHx8fHx8fHw_
Extra Antivir.ini
base.dat
base2.dat
Desc.dat
spline.dat

Unregister Extra Antivir registry values:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Extra Antivir

Extra Antivir Remover with free scan

BlackBerry Storm Update On The Way? Responsible For Delay? (RIMM)

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 11:30:00 +0000

Research In Motion's new touchscreen BlackBerry Storm -- the phone it's counting on to fend off Apple's (AAPL) iPhone this Christmas -- is still in short supply: Verizon Wireless again says new orders will ship "by 12/15," about a week later than it promised orders would ship last week.

Both companies have kept very quiet about the reason for the delay. Short supply is one theory. But rumors still persist that buggy software -- one of the reasons the Times' David Pogue thrashed the gadget last week -- is responsible for the delays. One reader sent us the following unconfirmed tip:

I know for a fact that VZW has 123,000+ Storms in their warehouse right at this very moment. I saw it on the computer screen with my own eyes in the VZW system. I was told none of them are shipping anywhere until they are flashed with new code. No matter how much RIM and VZW deny it, there is new software on the horizon.

Neither Verizon (VZ) nor RIM (RIMM) reps replied to our request for comment on that report.

But there's new evidence that RIM is working on a Storm update: Mobile blog Boy Genius Report has gotten ahold of a leaked version of new Storm software. Among its improvements: Faster switching between screens when you tilt the phone, better battery life, improvements to the Web browser, and faster browsing through music and photos.

Is this what's holding up the Storm? We don't know. But whatever it is, Verizon and RIM need to figure it out quickly. The Storm's bugs are one problem. Shipment delays are another. And neither is good news as they go up this month against the iPhone.

Blogs - As Big as You Want Them to Be

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 10:50:01 +0000

The Huffington Post has raised 25 million dollars in funding from Oak Investment Partners, claims AllThingsD.

According to AllThingsD, this puts the valuation for The Huffington Post at 100 million dollars. It’s a big valuation, and the 25 million dollar round is bigger than the previously rumored 15 million. A question that inevitably still pops up after any news such as this is: “How does this make sense? It’s just a blog!” I, however, don’t see why not.

I’ve checked out Huffington Post - which I rarely normally do as I’m not interested in politics - and I don’t see any crucial differences between this site, and any big media publication on the web. They’ve got news, reports, features, they seem to be timely and thorough, and they produce a lot of content. On the internet, that’s pretty much all that matters: whether you’ve got a team of 100 people behind the site or it’s just a one man gig, all your readers care about is the content.

The only difference between a blog and any other media publication is that blogs scale very well. Traditionally, if you want to start a newspaper, you need editors, journalists, graphic designers, you need money for print, you need marketing, and a zillion other things just to start off. And it all costs a lot of money.

On a blog, starting out is not only cheap: it’s free. You just start writing. If you’re good, then you get audience, and you can add all those things mentioned above as you go along. However, this doesn’t at all mean that a blog cannot be bigger than the New York Times: there’s absolutely no reason why it couldn’t. And one day, it’ll happen. In fact, blogs usually understand the new media better than old giants. Valuating The Huffington Post at $100 million may be brave, but it’s definitely not insane; we’ll see if this particular bet pays off.

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AlfaClock Free Edition 1.99

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 10:06:53 +0000

Overview
AlfaClock is a small freeware program that replaces your Windows tray clock with a better clock, with a lot more features.

Review

The main reason that pushed me to search for a Windows tray clock replacement is that most times I don’t know the date, I have some problems with the calendar I might say. So I wanted a freeware program that could show me date, time and maybe give me some more features without having a huge memory footprint.

So here’s AlfaClock.

AlfaClock screenshot

It shows the date and time and it has a quite small memory footprint, around 5 MB. The good thing is that you can customize almost everything concerning the clock display, from the date format to fonts and colors. Another good feature is that the calendar pops up if you click the tray clock, and that is just what I wanted. It also offers an alarm clock feature if you need it.

Version Tested

1.99

Author

www.alfasoftweb.com

Operating System

Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP

Download link

Summary

Tiny, easy to use.

The features are just what I needed, nothing more, nothing less.

Does not have a Vista version.

It can only be used for free until March 2009. Enough time to find something better.

Rating

Verdict

AlfaClock Free Edition is good enough for my needs. It has a paid version too, but the freeware version offers enough features. It can only be used for free until March 2009 they say. Well, I guess I’ll find something better until then, or maybe they will change their mind.

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If you have any trouble with this software just leave a comment, I’ll help you out! If you know better free programs in the same category, please let me know!

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