Square is not the only player in the game of turning a smart phone into a credit card reader, because a company known as Mophie is now entering the same game. Mophie has been in the game of extending the battery life of iPhone, but now Mophie has one more product adding to its inventory. Credit card reader through iPhone and other smart phones allow people to sell and trade right on the spot. I predict this trend won’t be as hot as online auction like eBay trend that came before, but it’s a new way and one more way for people to quickly sell things on the spot. I’m still totally new to this idea, and so please take my opinion with a grain of salt. What you think about credit card reader from smart phones?
Here comes 2010, and the past 10 years we saw how gadgets exploded. Most people now have so many gadgets on them that you can say it’s ridiculous. I think we think of gadgets as fashion! For an example, my sister bought a Sony W series netbook was not because it was useful, but it was pretty in pink! She got an iPhone not because she wanted to jailbreak it, but she thought it was pretty. You got the point! Gadgets and other electronic toys are useful, but we want them to be more than just useful — fashion is the word. What will the future be for gadgets?
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An Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, talked about how Amazon was able to survive a bad economy. The idea was to do a good job in a cumulative basis. Amazon is proud of its employees who had done exceptionally job in providing fast delivery service, low prices, and other Amazon’s services to the customers from the previous four to five years. A teacher thinks this is a brilliant truth. She goes on and explains that as a teacher, she feels like merit pay system that the educational reformers want may not work (i.e., superficial). Teacher is there to teach, and each teacher is only a single piece of a puzzle that helps churn out good students over the course of several years. If you don’t know what merit pay is, here is the link to explain what is merit pay. In my opinion, merit pay is somewhat superficial, but it does have benefits. It’s like an incentive for better teaching, and maybe merit pay is just one piece of a puzzle in making the whole educational system works better in the long run.
Sometimes the good guys had to be on the offensive! Couple IT professionals and researchers from security firms are fighting bad guys with everything they got and knew of, and they had a run when they did that the last time. They took a botnet known as Mega-D down by isolating the botnet’s zombies and trapping the botnet’s zombies. They calculated that Mega-D was the root for 12% spam of all spams. Counting number for Mega-D zombies is about 250,000 infected computers. Don’t be so happy though, the good guys know that the victory for the last battle is only the beginning of an endless waves of new spams to come. More.
How far a corporate willing to go to monitor employees? In this case Walmart was going as far as installing a video surveillance camera inside a unisex bathroom. This is more like a peeping tom thing than a loss prevention program that Walmart claims it was doing so. Perhaps, Walmart is try to see how far it can push the privacy law? Although not all states are clearly stated that having a surveillance video camera in bathroom is a violation, but common sense shows that nobody wants someone else takes a peek at such a private moment. Just to be cleared, only one known Walmart store so far is doing this, and it is located in Easton, Pennsylvania. Some of the employees there who had complained were fired. The seven employees are now suing Walmart over this matter. Source.
Technology is moving fast, and so the entertainment industry have to try out new tactics just to keep up with the money trend. Instead of releasing digital contents at the same time with DVDs, movie industry is going to release the digital contents before DVDs become available in stores near you. So now you have a choice, not to spend money but you have to content with a crappy grainy pirated version of a movie, or you can pay up and watch an HD version of a movie — just remember that you don’t have to wait for a DVD to be released. Just to be not so optimistic, not all players in the movie industry are doing this just yet, and so far the players that are willing to go this far are Sony Pictures and Showtime. Source.
Why should you be worried the next time you click on an invite in your email’s Inbox from a social network’s online friend? McAfee predicts that in 2010, hackers (i.e., crackers) are depending on most widely used technology and new technology to lure the gullible bunches for profit. Hackers want you to visit websites that have flash and Adobe Reader’s files, because those two products are widely used by everyone. Flash is big since YouTube and just about all other online video portals are using it to stream videos. Not trying to scare you, but maybe the next time you visit an unknown website that allows you to play video in flash, it may very well be a website that a hacker had created to infect your computer with some kind of computer exploits that are related to flash. Although McAfee is only making predictions, you can bet that those predictions are pretty realistic — maybe the hackers (i.e., crackers) have quite a few tricks that nobody has yet to know how to defend in the year of 2010. Source.
There are paranoid geeks out there that love to clear up the clipboard whenever they finish using their computers. There is a quick way to let you clear up your clipboard, but before you can do that, you have to create a shortcut for this action. I’m going to demo this in Windows 7 in a video, and you can check it out after the jump.
People are having fun in turning their Linux machines into look-alike Windows XP machines. A Chinese Linux distribution known as Ylmf OS looks almost identical to Windows XP. The truth is that underneath the look, Ubuntu probably is the core. Check out the videos after the jump to see how people make their Linux machines to look like Windows XP and Windows 7.
Some people may find Linux slow and jaggy in the videos, but in reality, the screencast software that some of these video creators used create jaggy videos. The real Linux can be as fast as Windows 7, or even faster in some aspects. Nonetheless, Windows 7 is excellent, and it’s a formidable competitor to Linux’s Ubuntu. I’ve been using both Linux’s Ubuntu (and Mint) and Windows 7, and I’ve found out that I love them all. I like the fact that in Linux, the security is much better, and I like the fact that Windows 7 is somewhat prettier by default (and easier to use). Adobe is friendly to Windows but not Linux, because flash is working really well on Windows 7 (64 bit machine), but flash doesn’t play that well on 64 bit machine using Ubuntu 9.10 (and Mint).
I can see why people wanting to turn their Linux machines to look like Windows 7, because it’s fun, challenging, and pretty. It’s like getting the best parts of both world! To me it’s freedom!
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