Author: Dr. Bill

A pretty good deal!

Amazon Offers Unlimited Cloud Music Storage for $20 per Year

Amazon just upped the ante in the cloud music wars (oh yes, that’s a thing now) by announcing some enticing new offers and features for its Cloud Drive service.

Cloud Drive, you’ll remember, is Amazon’s version of iTunes. You pay your fee and get to keep all your music on Amazon’s servers. Listening to stuff is as easy as clicking a play button in a web browser.

When it first launched, there were grumblings of iDiscontent because the player wasn’t officially supported on Apple’s mobile devices, but that’s one of the things Amazon’s just fixed. From now on, the Cloud Player works just fine on an iPad.

The other slice of new is a time-limited special offer, clearly designed to lure in new customers: free music storage with all paid file storage plans.
That means you can sign up for the basic 20GB storage offer, and you’ll be allowed to upload your entire 200GB music collection without making a dent in your allowance. You’ll still have 20GB free for, you know, all your other stuff. Whatever that is. The entry-level free service, offering 5GB of file storage, is not included in the special offer.

So the deal’s pretty clear: if you want to put your entire music collection the cloud, you can, for a minimum spend of $20 per year. There’s no need to pay out for storage that matches the size of your music library.”

That’s what Microsoft is doing for it’s new Office365 “Cloud Software Service!”

Microsoft pays University of Nebraska $250,000 to use Office 365

“If you really are in need of some high profile clients, you can always pay them. That’s exactly what Microsoft has done with the University of Nebraska. The university will receive $250,000 in incentives from Microsoft to migrate its email and calendaring system to the recently announced Office365 platform.

The school had been using IBM’s Lotus Notes for these services, however that system had begun to age — having been in use since 1997. IBM had pitched its cloud-based version of Notes to the school, but could not come close to Microsoft’s offer. Google was also said to be in the running but probably lost out for much of the same reason.

The funds will be used to subsidize the cost of migration, as well as fund support and the purchase of Microsoft software across the entire university. The switch is expected to save the school about $500,000 a year.”

Wow. When you have pay them to use it… well. Just something to ponder.

Or, you could just use Chrome. Just sayin’!

Is Firefox hogging RAM? Memory Restart can fix that

“When Mozilla released Firefox 4 (and now Firefox 5), it appeared to have finally fixed some of the performance-related gripes of earlier releases. Compared to Firefox 3.6, Firefox 5 is lightning fast, but sadly behind the scenes all is not as it should be. Firefox still suffers from a memory leak that sees its memory demands slowly spiral over an extended period of time, stealing precious system resources and affecting your PC’s performance as a result.

A simple restart fixes the problem, but it’s still annoying. The good news is that Mozilla developers are targeting this memory leak and think they may have found a way to fix it. If we’re lucky, the fix may even make it into Firefox 7, which is due to be released as Firefox Aurora imminently. In the meantime, how you can stop Firefox’s increasing memory demands from spiralling out of control? The answer lies with a tiny add-on appropriately titled Memory Restart.

Memory Restart does two things: first, it displays Firefox’s current memory consumption in the Add-ons Bar. This immediately reveals how Firefox’s memory demands increase over time, regardless of how it’s being used. When Firefox’s memory consumption hits 500MB, the text will change to red to warn you that it’s in danger of overrunning the rest of your system, telling you it’s time to shut down and restart Firefox to free up most of the memory it’s snaffled.
Memory Restart’s other trick is that you can configure it from its Options dialog to automatically restart Firefox when the 500MB threshold is reached, preserving all your open tabs and allowing you to continue browsing without too much hassle. Better still, the arbitrary 500MB figure can be altered to any amount you like, allowing you to tweak Memory Restart according to the amount of installed RAM in your computer.”

Memory Restart for Firefox

For business, stay with 3.3.3 for now, as I sadi before, but 3.4.1 has some bug-fixes. I like an active, vital Open Source community!

LibreOffice 3.4.1 fixes bugs, still not ready for enterprises

“The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 3.4.1, a landmark update for its open-source, multi-platform office application. With its release, LibreOffice 3.4.1 is now the recommended build for all users except large enterprises, thanks to the bug fixes and improved stability that provide the focus of the release.
LibreOffice is an off-shoot of the OpenOffice project, development of which has stalled since many developers switched across to LibreOffice when it was launched in September, 2010.

At the present time, there are two versions of LibreOffice available: an older 3.3.3 build for enterprise users, plus the recently released 3.4.1 build for all other users. Enterprise users are asked to hold off deploying a 3.4.x build until version 3.4.2 is released at the end of the month.

LibreOffice 3.4.1 is purely a maintenance release, with no new features. However, users who are switching to the 3.4.x build from version 3.3.x, will find a number of a new features that were introduced in version 3.4, which are detailed at the LibreOffice website. These include improved compatibility with Excel spreadsheets in Calc, renamed Data Pilot component (now called PivotTable) and improved HTML export options in Impress and Draw applications.”

Wow! The browser wars are heating up. Internet Explorer’s numbers are falling, but so is Mozilla Firefox. I think it is because Google Chrome is just SO much faster, and Firefox memory issues are still slowing it down!

Internet Explorer usage is a falling rock

“First of the month means fresh browser usage data from NetApplications. Despite all the hoopla about IE9, Internet Explorer’s share, as measured in usage, declined (again) in June — to 53.68 percent from 54.27 percent in May and 55.11 percent in April. Internet Explorer 9 launched in March.

Firefox usage share dipped slightly — 21.71 percent to 21.67 percent month over month. Chrome continued its steady gains, up to 13.11 percent from 12.52 percent. Safari also nudged up, to 7.48 percent from 7.28 percent. Opera was the month’s other shocking loser, with usage sharing falling to 1.73 percent from 2.03 percent.
Google and Mozilla are now cranking out new browser versions every few months, pushing Microsoft to speed up, too. Already, Google has released three Chrome versions this year, and v13 is beta testing.

IE9 was supposed to be the browser that fixed Microsoft’s problems, according to NetApps. In January, IE share was 56 percent. A year earlier 62.12 percent, and 75.47 percent in January 2008. Unless Microsoft can reverse the ongoing trend, Internet Explorer’s global market share will fall below 50 percent sometime in the next 12-18 months.

As it has done in other months, NetApps spun Internet Explorer numbers around Microsoft’s risky bet on Windows 7. IE9 does not support Windows XP, which still represents most of the Windows install base. NetApps seems convinced that as more people adopt Windows 7, IE usage will increase.”

Getting “touchy-feely” with a robot? Ah-no! I don’t think so!

Electronic Skin Gives Robots a Sense of Touch!

“Thanks to classic movies, many people view robots as clunky, lumbering galoots, knocking over lab racks and breaking through walls. While this image contrasts entirely with today’s violin playing robots, still robots aren’t typically known for their delicate sense of touch.

However, some researchers from the Technical University Munich (TUM) might be changing that stereotype. In their attempt to create a more sensitive robot, the team has produced small hexagonal plates that, when joined together, form a responsive robot skin.

The artificial skin is composed of small, rigid hexagonal circuit boards. Each circuit board has four infrared sensors that detect anything that comes closer than a centimeter, effectively stimulating light touch. Therefore, the robot can detect when it runs into things and either retreat from the object or direct its eyes to better examine the object.

As well, TUM researchers have embedded the plates with six temperatures sensors and an accelerometer. Researchers say these add self-perception to the robot by allowing it to register individual limb movement.”

Wow! Wanna get into designing games! If you have always wanted to create your own game, but thought the tools were just too expensive, check this out!

$5000 game-making software now free

“Caspian Software makes a product called Thinking Worlds, which the company describes as a “globally unique 3D sims & games engine and authoring environment.” The product lets both beginners and advanced game-makers create and publish games quickly and easily, and even publish to iPad and iPhone.

Developers see potential, pitfalls with iOS 5
On Friday, the company released the latest version of Thinking Worlds with the astonishing announcement that the formerly $4,999 package is now completely free to use. Advanced users will have the option to pay for additional features if they require them, but basic functionality is completely free.

The thinking behind the new approach to the software is that traditional barriers to game design—such as learning a complex programming language, the difficulty of creating 3D are and the challenges of publishing games—need to be overcome to allow creative minds to make the games they have locked in their imaginations. Thinking Worlds’ finished projects can be published as standalone titles for PC, but can also be run via web browser and iOS devices.”

I have updated the Dr. Bill.TV web site with the new MediaLister software. It now has more features, and should be easier to use! Here’s a link:

Dr. Bill.TV Web Site

Clink on the “Episodes” link at the top of the site at this link, then try clicking on an episode. Note that the new display has a still photo of each video (like an excerpt from it.) And, there is more info on each episode available per generated (via MediaLister) page! Cool huh!?!