If Black Friday wasn't enough for you, you're in luck. Cyber Monday, which occurs Nov. 30 this year, brings a new round of dirt-cheap discounts. What's the distinction between these two marketing gimmicks? Well, Black Friday, the much-hyped start of the gift-buying season, came first. Originally a brick-and-mortar happening the day after Thanksgiving, BF has mutated into a November-long orgy of screaming buys. It has since moved online too;
The holiday season is here, as are the accompanying parties and celebratory events. If you're all gussied up, you might as well bring a camera like Sony's fashion-conscious, 10.2-megapixel Cyber-shot DSC TX1 ($380 as of 11/23/2009), a touchscreen camera that lets you party instead of fussing with camera settings.
Are you in the market for a laptop or netbook this holiday season? Then check out the hot deals below. I've scoured the Web looking for the best Black Friday laptop and netbook deals priced less than $400. I've found offers from many major retailers, as well as some handy tips to help you map out this year's shopping strategy.
Have you already tried Chrome OS using a virtual machine, and were less than impressed? Well now you can get a feel for how Google's Web-centric operating system will run natively on your machine. The folks over at Engadget were able to boot Chromium OS -- the open source version of what will become Chrome OS -- off of a USB stick on a Dell Vostro A90 netbook. The USB bootable disc is based on the Chromium OS build of Twitter user Hexxeh, who set up a Web site where you can view all the instructions you need for getting your bootable USB up and running.
Google will finally take the wrapper off its highly-anticipated Chrome operating system during a presentation at Google HQ on Thursday. The event will include a complete overview of the product featuring a Chrome OS demonstration and Q&A session. Sundar Pichai, Google's vice president of product management and Matthew Papakipos, Google engineering director for Google Chrome OS, will speak at the event, according to TechCrunch.
Nokia spokespeople are quick to correct you if you slip and call the Booklet 3G a netbook. Well, let's see: It has a tiny, clamshell, laptop-like design. It has meager specs (1GB of RAM, Intel's Z530 1.6-GHz Atom CPU, and a 4200-rpm 120GB hard drive). It has a 10.1-inch screen. Last time I checked, that was pretty much the definition of a netbook. The Booklet 3G just happens to be a reasonably well-constructed model with a focus on being 3G wireless-ready. But are you willing to shell out $599, sans contract (price as of 11/13/09), for Nokia's maiden effort in the netbook market (or $299 subsidized through an AT&T data plan)?
YouTube says it will start supporting 1080p high-definition video in full resolution starting next week. The Google-owned video-sharing site will add support for viewing videos in 720p or 1080p resolutions, depending on the resolution of the original source.
bend it to your will? No problem. We've got plenty of tips, hacks and secrets to keep you busy for a long time, including automatically opening Windows Explorer to a folder of your choice, speeding up taskbar thumbnails, finding hidden desktop themes, forcing User Account Control to act the way you'd like, keeping your Explorer searches secret from others, and more. 
Demon's Souls is hard. Harder than sailing through Nintendo's Punch-Out!! cheat-free. Harder than solving a Rubik's Cube blindfolded. Harder than luring CBS to feature you for ranking "top Guitar Hero III player in the world." Harder than scoring a fabled 3,333,360 points in Pac-Man…
Windows 7 users got a nice surprise on Tuesday when Microsoft released its first set of security patches since unveiling the new operating system last month. Of the 15 bugs patched, none affected Windows 7.
When Microsoft launched Windows 7, it was billed as the company's most secure release ever -- the culmination of a nine-year "Trustworthy Computing" effort to shore up a product line that had been riddled with major security holes.
But does stress-tested software really matter to Microsoft's customers, seemingly besieged by more online attacks than ever before? Microsoft had years to improve Windows XP, but the Conficker worm, which began spreading last year, is now thought to have infected more than 7 million Windows machines. And for every Windows bug that gets squashed, hackers seem to find new problems in the software that runs on top of Microsoft's operating system -- Flash Player, QuickTime and Java.
"Windows 7 is definitely by far the most secure system they've shipped," said Dave Aitel, chief technology officer with Immunity, a security company that spends a lot of time finding the latest software bugs. "I guess the question that everybody is asking right now is, 'Is this enough?'"
The man behind Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing initiative, Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie, says the industry still has work to do. "We've made huge progress with respect to security around the core OS technology in the Windows PC," he said in a recent interview. "But as we did that and the 'Net became more prevalent, the bad guys continued to evolve their attacks."
This is Microsoft's conundrum. Windows may be safer, but cyber-criminals still have plenty of other places to attack. And when you can hit hundreds of millions of users with a single attack, why change the game plan? So most of the worst attacks today still target PCs running Windows, whether the OS itself is secure or not.
Take spear-phishing. Attackers are getting so good at sending these highly customized e-mail messages, complete with malicious attachments, that the underlying security of Windows is almost irrelevant.
"The problem with the targeted attacks is that there's so much money that they can actually trump the security," said Alan Paller, director of research for the SANS Institute, a security training company. "The amount of money that governments and large industrial crime groups have to spend is enough to trump any of the defenses we have."
In a report released last month for a congressional advisory panel, Northrop Grumman analysts detailed exactly how this happens. Looking at known attacks, the report found that targets are carefully selected, and then sent very believable e-mails with maliciously encoded attachments that exploit bugs in a product such as Adobe Reader -- something that's outside of Microsoft's control. The victim opens the .pdf and suddenly attackers have a foothold on the network.
Microsoft customers like Paul Melson think there will be much broader enterprise adoption of Windows 7 than there was with Vista, which was largely ignored by corporate users. But while Microsoft has its own house in order, security is still a problem on the Windows platform, according to Melson, a manager of information security with Priority Health.
"As long as third-party patching continues to be a challenge, client security will continue to be at the forefront of information security defense and incident response," he said via e-mail. "Windows 7 won't significantly reduce client-side attacks that lead to compromises, but I don't think that Microsoft should bear the burden for it, either."
Microsoft thinks it can go a long way toward solving this type of problem by improving the way people identify each other on the Internet. For the past few years it has promoted an idea it calls "end-to-end" trust, saying it wants to develop better identification mechanisms for people, computers and software on the Internet.
Microsoft has taken its first step in this direction with its Windows CardSpace identity management software. It could help give people a better sense of who they're really dealing with on the Internet, but whether the rest of the industry will buy into this vision remains to be seen.
"This is the next phase in the battle for trustworthy computing and that is still getting ramped up," Mundie said. "Clearly there's always more to do."
Activision Blizzard will make a $1 million donation to unemployed military vets through their Call of Duty Endowment (CODE,) a charity foundation intended to help veterans find gainful employment.According to a Washington Post article published yesterday, the CODE (which coincidentally makes its first donation concurrently with the Modern Warfare 2 release) is meant to support organizations which train veterans to operate in a profit-driven industry after years of public service. A 2008 Veteran's Affairs study cited by the Post claims that veterans are more comfortable working in public positions and have difficulty adjusting to a career in private industry, in part because "service members perform their duties within tightly defined skill sets and are not working towards creating a profit during their military tenure."
Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick bemoans the disproportionate unemployment rate among veterans, claiming that society does not do enough to support our armed forces when they retire from active duty. "The joblessness rate that [veterans] should have should be far less than the national average, not more," said Kotick. "How do you expect people to actually join the military if when they leave the military they can't integrate back into the free market they're supposed to be protecting?"
Honest or not, statistics gathered by public and private researchers support Kotick's concern. U.S. unemployment rates finally breached 10 percent this month (the first time since 1983,) yet in 2008 more than 18 percent of recent veterans (1-3 years since discharge) were unemployed. That's almost double the national average, and organizations like CODE intend to assist government aid programs by giving veterans the training and connections they need to start a new career. To that end CODE is funneling $125,000 to help the Paralyzed Veterans of America build a vocational rehab center.
Activision has a history of associating with the U.S. military (the publisher regularly makes donations of games and consoles to service members through the USO) and now they've called on those connections to bring a number of high-profile military leaders out of retirement to join CODE's Board of Directors, including Army General James Marks. Activision's glamorization of modern warfare may be controversial, but it's refreshing to see a games publisher written up in a national newspaper for something other than sex, blood or violence.
A group calling itself "Control Your Info" appears to have taken control of several dozen Facebook groups, inserting its own logo and stating "Hello, we hereby announce that we have officially hijacked your Facebook group."With a link back to a site, the apparent members -- using the names "Bella Roregit," "Burstin Woltan" and "Janis Roukkos" -- began leaving their mark on various Facebook groups intended for topics that include entertainment, business and sports. The Control Your Info statements declared: "This means we control a certain part of the information about you in Facebook. If we wanted, we could make you appear in a bad way which could damage you severely."
According to the Control Your Info Web site, the group's mission is to bring attention to security weaknesses in social media.
"Social media has become a natural part of most people's daily lives. Unfortunately, the security aspects of social media have been more or less neglected." Control Your Info did not immediately respond to a request for comment about its activities.
Facebook, however, has issued a statement about the incident that says, "There has been no hijacking and there is no confidential information at risk. The groups in question have been abandoned by their previous owners, which means any group member has the option to make themselves an administrator in order to continue communication to the group. Group administrators have no access to private user information and group members can leave a group at any time. For small groups, administrators can simply edit a group name or info, moderate discussion and message group members. The names of large groups cannot be changed nor can anyone message all members. In the rare instances when we find a group has been changed inappropriately, we will disable the group, which is the action we plan for these groups."
Some users in the groups affected by the Control Your Info takeover were obviously displeased about the turn of events and scornful of Control Your info's explanation about how it's making a point about security by taking control.
"I have an idea, why don't I teach you about traffic safety by running you over with my car? wrote one irate Facebook user in a group that had been commandeered by Control Your Info. "Is that how it works?
Michael Sutton, vice president of security research at zScaler, said he doesn't think the Control Your Info takeovers constitute a major security concern. That's because the person who creates a group of this sort on Facebook is by default the administrator, and when this individual decides to abandon that by de-listing as the admin, anyone else in the group can step in to promote themselves be the administrator. That's the way Facebook designed this type of group and is clear about it, though other types of Facebook groups, such as closed ones, have different security procedures. In that case, the Control Your Info people simply did a search to discover the type of Facebook groups that had the administrator position abandoned, and stepped in with their dramatic hijacking routine. "This is really making a mountain out of a molehill," he said.
These days, 4.3-inch-diasgonal screens are the standard size on dedicated GPS navigation devices; but for some drivers, that size is still too small.In response, most of the top-tier GPS manufacturers, have introduced models with bigger screens--anywhere from 4.7 to 5.2 inches. TomTom's two offerings, the XXL 540S and the XXL 530S, have 5-inch screens. I recently took the XXL 540S for a test drive.The XXL 540S ($300, as of November 4, 2009), the $200 TomTom One 140S, and the $250 TomTom XL 340S share a virtually identical feature set. For its part, the $280 XXL 530s lacks a lane guidance feature and maps of Mexico, and has a smaller points-of-interest (POI) database.
The $50 premium that the XXL 540S commands over the XL 340S may sound steep when you consider that you're getting a screen diagonal that's only 0.7 inch longer; but that works out to 33 percent more display real estate, and it's a welcome addition. The XXL 540S has the same easy-to-use interface and menu system that virtually all other TomTom products do, but it's easier to see on a bigger screen.
Tapping anywhere on the map view takes you to the main menu with two screens of options, including 'Navigate to', 'Help me', 'Change Preferences', 'Map Corrections', and route/itinerary planning. The 540S supports multisegment routing, so you can plan a trip with multiple intermediate waypoints. The 'Help me' Menu gives you options for driving, phoning, or walking to help; provides you with your exact location; and includes a basic first-aid guide.
You have a full range of "navigate to" options including addresses, POIs, favorites, home, recent destinations, a point on map, your previous stop, and latitude/longitude coordinates. The 540S includes a generous 7 million POI database that you can search by category or by name. You can specify searches limited to destinations near your location, in a city, or near your home, or (if you have an active route) POIs along your route or near a specified destination.
Like most TomTom products, the XXL 540S comes with IQ Routes, which can calculate routes and estimate times of arrival based on historical traffic data rather than on speed limits. For example, a trip from New Jersey to Manhattan takes longer during weekday rush-hour traffic than on a weekend or at midday. The XXL 540S takes such variability into account in generating recommended routes. And even without a live traffic receiver, its travel-time estimates are pretty accurate.
The test routes I generated were the ones that I would normally take--a good sign. After devising a route, the 540S provides excellent options including listing directions turn-by-turn, displaying maneuvers as images, showing a route summary, or demonstrating the trip. Initial route calculation for longer trips took somewhat slower than on many competing devices, but recalculation after a missed turn was snappy. Satellite acquisition times, following downloads of quick-fix data, were almost instantaneous. The device's audio feature pronounced street names clearly and at an appropriate level (volume is linked to the vehicle speed).
You can customize the status bar on the map view with the data you'd like to see. I updated my review unit to show remaining time, remaining distance, arrival time, vehicle speed, vehicle direction, lane guidance, speed limit, and compass. For a less cluttered screen, you can deselect as many options as you like.
The XXL 540S lacks some features (such as a Bluetooth phone interface, a multimedia player, and built-in live traffic) that you might expect on a premium-priced GPS device; TomTom saves those features for its high-end Go series of products. Nevertheless, the XXL 540S is upgradable to live traffic if you buy an optional RDS-TMC traffic receiver for $60; that price includes a year's subscription to traffic data, after which thedata costs $60 per year.
I plugged in the optional traffic receiver, and the XXL 540S recognized it and immediately started downloading traffic information. On my road tests with the traffic receiver attached, I received notices about delays along my route, but the XXL 540S assured me that I was still on the fastest route.
Using the free, downloadable TomTom Home application (available for PC or Mac), you can keep your 540S up-to-date with the latest firmware release, GPS quick-fix data, and community-based map updates, and you can purchase additional voices as well as 12 months of map updates. Map Share technology lets you update road closures, name changes, street direction changes and POIs. You can choose to share your updates with the TomTom community, and you can update your device from the community-supplied data.
I've tested and reviewed other TomTom units in the past and liked the company's standard interface; but for me, the 5-inch screen makes the XXL 540S a winner.
A number of issues can slow down a once fast PC. Here are some of the most common.
An overloaded and fragmented hard drive. If your drive is too full (more than about 80 percent), or too fragmented (the two often go together), it could be slowing down your PC, especially if you don't have much RAM.
Defragging is the easiest solution, so you should try that first. To defrag in XP, select Start, then My Computer. Right-click your C: drive and select Properties. Click the Tools tab, then Defragment Now. Vista defrags automatically--or at least it does so in theory. See Vista Defrag Problems for details. Or you can go with a third-party defragger. Forum regular Flashorn recommends the free MyDefrag, which looked pretty good when I checked it out.
If your drive is getting full and defragging doesn't help, you may have to make hard decisions about what you can delete or off-loaded to an external drive. Or you could replace the drive with a larger one.
Avoid new programs. Software has a way of cancelling out Moore's Law--as hardware gets faster, software gets slower. (I attended a programming conference once where Bill Gates advised programmers to write for the most powerful PC currently available, because that would match a normal PC when their product was released.) So if you keep buying the latest office suite or photo editor, performance will suffer.
Watch your security software. You can avoid upgrading Office and Photoshop, but you have to keep your security software up to date or you risk infection. Major security suites like Norton and McAfee use a lot of resources, and keep using more with each major upgrade. They can seriously slow down an older PC. Consider switching to smaller, sleeker (and often free) alternatives.
Reduce the autoloaders. Your security programs probably aren't the only ones that load automatically each time you boot and stay in memory, although they may be the only ones that should. Any number of programs you've installed may have inserted a piece of themselves into Windows' Startup list, and could thus be slowing you down.
And remember, when it comes to upgrading your hardware, adding RAM is relatively cheap and usually very effective.
If you're still thinking about stepping to Windows 7, but are appalled by the usual pricing, you might want to check out some special deals now available from Microsoft and some of its retail partners. Each of these offers comes with some catches, though.I first spotted a mention of Windows 7 discounts in Kim Komando's CyberSpeak column in USA Today. ZDNet's Ed Bott dives down into a lot of details.
In one deal, the Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade Family Pack, you can get up to 58 percent off if you have two or more PCs at home and want to upgrade them. The package of two DVDs includes one copy each of the 32- and 64-bit Windows Home Premium upgrade installation media, with a single activation key good for activation on up to three PCs. Pricing is $149.99 from The Microsoft Store, but you might be able to buy the pack for less elsewhere online.
In another offer, when you buy a new PC running Windows 7, you can get a second copy of Windows 7 for use with another PC at a price break of up to 50 percent. In addition to The Microsoft Store, participating retailers include Tiger Direct, Newegg.com, Staples, Office Depot, Best Buy, Radio Shack, Amazon, Walmart, Office Depot, Costco, and Buy.com.
A third deal, known as the Anytime Upgrade, is for someone who already has a Windows 7 PC, but wants to upgrade to another edition of the new OS, With the Anytime Upgrade, you can move from the Windows 7 Home Premium Edition to Win 7 Professional for $89.95 direct from Microsoft. In comparison, a Windows 7 Professional retail upgrade would cost you $199.99, for example.
But what if you have a single older PC and you want to upgrade it to Windows 7? As reported in Computerworld, you can buy an OEM or "system builder" edition of Windows 7 for slightly less than Microsoft's upgrade edition through an online retailer such as Tiger Direct or Newegg. You'll get a full license with the OEM edition, but with several stipulations. The OEM edition comes without customer support, it can only be used for a clean install, and the license bans users from transferring the OS from one PC to another.
