Latest Browser Stats..

Worldwide browser market share studies done by independent Internet research companies provide an insight to who’s using what to surf the net. Companies like Net Applications, The Counter, and One Stat measure the usage of web browsers by calculating the percentages of visitors to certain sets of websites. Ars Technica recently published the result for the September browser stats, and Internet Explorer is still losing ground for all other browsers despite retaining the biggest market share.

Results are as follows:

These figures represent all available versions for each corresponding browser. The highlight this month was that for the first time the percentage of Internet users still using Internet Explorer 6.0 has finally dropped below the quarter mark of all Internet surfers.

Comparing this to stats from late 2004, where Internet Explorer controlled the market with 91%, only shows the gradual but sure decline of the Microsoft browser near monopoly.

For full results and graphs, check the Ars Technica post here.

Windows Mobile 6.5 gets bad reviews, really bad..

Microsoft’s latest mobile OS has been released yesterday and already the reviews are pouring in, the bad reviews I might add. The new Windows Mobile 6.5 has been announced early this year, along with Microsoft’s new branding term of ‘Windows Phone’, promising a more appealing and finger-friendly update. Now that it’s released, everybody is already looking forward for Windows Mobile 7 expected next year.

Reviews are so bad that TechCrunch actually titled their review, “It Still Sucks”, Gizmodo choose another embarrassing title for their review, “There’s No Excuse For This’, while ZDNet summed it up in just one word, “Disappoints”.

The thing about Windows Mobile is that ever since version 5, nothing has been really updated or revamped. Version 6 was just a facelift, so was version 6.1 and now with 6.5, the plastic surgery efforts continues. It seems like Microsoft is going for the charms of number 7, for both it’s OS platforms Windows and Windows Mobile.

The reviews were done mainly on HTC phones, like the Touch Diamond and the Pure, along with AT&T as the carrier. According to the Information Week, the business value of technology blog, Motorola stated that they are not interested in the new Windows Mobile version and that they are not including it in their road map at all. Instead they are going to focus their efforts on two major smartphone platforms. One of them is most definitely going to be Google’s Android, but there was no word on the other.

For a full review, with lots of photos and a demo video, check out this post on SlashGear.

Toyota iQ Font..

There are thousands of fonts out there and there are hundreds more created ever day. These are not the results of a university-sponsored study or anything, I just want to say that there are a lot of fonts out there.  In case you’re looking to download some fonts to use in your upcoming presentation, check out the 1001 free fonts website.

There are lots of ways to create a font, but non is as creative, imaginative or sophisticated as the way used to create the Toyota iQ font. Two typographers, Pierre and Damien, a pro race pilot, Stef van Campenhoudt, and a software developer, Zachary Lieberman, collaborated to design a font using a car, the Toyota iQ. The car movements were tracked using a custom software, and each letter of the alphabet was maneuvered according to a set plan. To give you a clearer idea, here’s the ‘making of’ video..

Whether you’d like the final result, being the iQ font, or not, you have to give credit to those guys for their creativity.

Download the font here.

Facebook and their Advertising Policy..

A viral note circulating around the web, about 3rd party ad networks using your Facebook photos in their ads without your permission, has turned into a frenzy this morning. The message being forwarded by Facebook users started early today and it goes like this..

Facebook has agreed to let 3rd party advertisers use your photos in their ads without your permission (and so presumably, forever). TO OPT OUT: Click on ‘Settings’ (in top nav bar, next to logout); Drop down to ‘Privacy Settings’; select ‘News Feed and Wall’; Select tab for ‘Facebook Ads’ and ‘No one’ in the drop down. Save changes and PASS THIS ON.

The issue of 3rd party advertisers using your Facebook photos was first raised by the Download Squad back on the 16th of this month in this article here. It raised a few eyebrows but was all ok until this morning when that note starting invading facebook with the above mentioned warning. The Allfacebook.com unofficial resource blog posted an article stating that Facebook have been using your photos for a long time now, in their Group, Page, and Application advertising.  ‘Social Ads’ as facebook used to call them, and then later called ‘Facebook Ads’, takes it by default that you agree to this behavior unless you explicitly turn it off. It was debated as being illegal at the time, which was late 2007!

The Allfacebook article continues to state that by following the instructions in the note to make changes to your privacy setting will not remove your photos from 3rd party ad networks. 3rd party ad networks are not forced by facebook to check this particular setting before attempting to use your photos. The big issue here is using your photos without your consent. If Facebook decides to prevent ad networks from using user images all together, that will be a very aggressive action resulting in big losses for a lot of 3rd party developers. Extending the privacy settings, on the other hand,  so that 3rd ad networks are forced to check the privacy setting when displaying an ad is still costly to Facebook in terms of development and costly to ad networks in terms of ad display processing overhead.

Facebook has officially commented on the issue in a recent blog post stating that the ads mention by the Download Squad were in violation of their policies by misusing profile photos, and that they have already required the removal of those deceptive ads from 3rd party applications even before this rumor began spreading.

Come to think of it, the majority of Facebook user photos are publicly accessible via Google. That means ad networks have the capacity to view some of your friends and their photos via crawling their public profiles. However, if all users start to make their profiles private, it would certainly affect the social network scene and drive Facebook’s popularity downwards.

It all comes to one conclusion, if you don’t want your photos to be viewed or shared or used by anyone with an internet connection and a browser, you better not upload them in the first place. You choose what you allow the world to see, so choose carefully.

Spyware as an update!

A bit of disturbing news has been circulating around the internet lately related to an alleged spyware distributed by a cellular carrier in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Posts on Ars Technica (latin for ‘the art of technology’) and the Wall Street Journal report that the UAE carrier Etisalat has rolled out an update for its BlackBerry users last month that supposedly improved the conversion between 2G and 3G networks. Customers who accepted the update, reported some disrupting behavior affecting their ability to send or receive emails and draining their batteries.

When digging deep into the software update, some software security companies along with RIM (Research In Motion, the Canadian developer of the BlackBerry) claim that the update contained a surveillance software designed by a company called SS8 Networks Inc. which specializes in various forms of electronic surveillance.

Etisalat have posted an article on their website dated July 15th, confirming a conflict in settings for some BlackBerry devices which has led to a slight technical fault while upgrading the software.

The big problem with the story, if it was true, is that this attempt was not done by some unauthorized scammer pretending to be the service provider. It was done by the service provider, and that’s something very difficult to guard against to say the least.

Read the full article of the Wall Street Journal here, and the article of Ars Technica here.

Microsoft kills its Soapbox..

A soapbox is a raised platform on which one stands to give a speech. The term originated from speakers standing on wooden boxes meant for holding soap (refer to wikipedia on soapbox).

Back in 2006, Soapbox was the name Microsoft chose for its video sharing service. If you’ve never heard of it, it seems you’re not alone. The service struggled to compete with rivals, particularly as it launched around the same time as Google bought out YouTube. One notable statistic was that only 2 of the 30 most popular clips on Soapbox were uploaded by people using language other than English, which shows the service failure to attract English speakers away from YouTube or other video sharing services.

And so, Microsoft has announced that it will completely shutdown the service by the end of August this year. It also announced to its current users that no new clips will be accepted after July 29.

Soapbox isn’t the first Microsoft service to fall behind and crash against more successful rivals. Earlier this year Microsoft finally abandoned its Encarta encyclopedia after acknowledging it had become redundant in the Wikipedia age. Microsoft has also recently dropped the Microsoft Money personal finance package, though not because of rivals taking business away, it was more a case of poor demand for the product.

Read more details about this here.

Laptop Buying Guide..

If you’ve bought a computer before, you already know that it’s not as easy as shopping! There are so many brand out there, so many models, and so many specs to choose from. You get confused and either drop the idea, look for someone on the geeky side of thing to help you out, or just rely on the fact that all your friends call you ‘lucky’. Well, there a better way to do it, and that’s the Laptop Buying Guide.

It might as well be called the Computer Buying Guide (whether a laptop or a desktop I mean), with some minor changes to the naming of hardware.  Screen size for a laptop translates to monitor size for a desktop, for example. Battery life and weight are not even considered for a desktop, but all the other specifications are identical. Processor specs (clock speed and cache memory size), RAM capacity, hard drive size, display card, connectivity are all the same for laptops or desktops (with a little twist on the processor architecture that is).

Now, the first thing you need to do when your’e buying a computer is to decide what you want it for? Is is for business use, like word processing and presentations and such? Is it for entertainment use, like playing music and movies? Is it for on-the-go gaming, like racing your career car in a Need for Speed drag race? The purpose of a computer pretty much determines the make.

Laptopical.com recently posted an article named ‘Laptop Buying Guide’ that uses this approach. Determining what you want it for as a first step, then giving you guidelines on what to look for. It even gives you recommendations on what models to buy. So, if you’re going to buy a computer any time soon, it’s really worth your while to read that article.

Read the full article here.

USB 3.0 coming soon..

Ever since the announcement of USB 3.0 back in November 2008, speculations of when exactly the new standard will go into manufacturing has been more of a wild guess rather than a real forecast. Things seem to have changed though, according to an article by Tech On which is a Japanese blog by Nikkei Business Publications concerned with tech and industry analysis from Asia. The article states that the hardware needed to mass-produce USB 3.0 chipsets is ready and production will begin before the end of this year.

The new USB 3.0 technology promises ultra-fast transfer speeds, the reason behind naming it SuperSpeed USB. By ultra-fast we mean transfer speeds of 5Gigabit per second (5Gbps), making it about 11 times faster than the current standard. To put things into prospective, this kind of transfer speed means that you can transfer 1Gigabyte of data from your hard drive to a USB flash drive in 1.6 seconds!

The main candidate to benefit from such lightning speed is High Definition video streaming. The current USB 2.0 implementation is already in use as video terminals connecting netbooks to external monitors. The new standard will be able to handle 1080i full HD video streams with this speed.

Read the full article here.

Microsoft Office 2010 Beta..

A fresh beta version of the most popular office suite is due to be unveiled this week to a private group at Microsoft’s annual Worldwide Partner Conference, according to a Blorge post yesterday. In preparation for this, Microsoft has posted a web advert positioning Office 2010 as an action movie.

This is the first beta to be talked about which means that the final product won’t be released till early next year.

Technical details are scarce, but the most notable addition to this Office suite is Microsoft’s plans to offer a web-based version of its Office productivity suite, known as Office Web, that will debut with the release of Office 2010. Office Web will include online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Rumors also has it that the new Office suite is going to be more server integrated with direct ties to Microsoft’s SharePoint Server.

Read the full Blorge article here.

A turning point for Operating Systems..

So, Google announced a future Operating System, big deal. It’s only joining the already heated battle between Microsoft and Apple (and maybe Linux from a distance). Well, no! It’s not just that. It’s big, and it’s going to be a turning point, a milestone, a big red check mark on the timeline chart of Operating Systems.

The reason is technically called ‘Cloud Computing’ and it simply means having everything cyber-based. Think of all the functions you use a computer for, and then think of them all over the internet. Almost all of them are becoming web-based already. You attach documents, view them, edit them, and send them online (using Gmail and Google Docs). You keep your contact list and calendar online (using Gmail and Google Calendar). You post your professional or social reviews online (using Google owned Blogger.com). You share and watch videos online (using Google owned YouTube.com). That’s what Cloud Computing means, resources provided as services over the internet, and that’s what’s so important about Google announcing a Chrome OS.

Chrome OS is not just a threat to Windows, it’s also a threat to the Mac OS X, maybe even to popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu. It’s a threat against current OS methodology.

There’s this great article written by Paul Thurrott and published on his SuperSite for Windows, that gives a very insightful view of the importance of the Google announcement and what it means to computing world. Read the full article here.