Macgasm

Microsoft is hilariously late to the tablet market with anything resembling a modern tablet OS. Sure, Bill Gates loved the idea of a Windows desktop with a stylus, but that ain’t no tablet, sonny! As Windows 8 (RT BBQ Edition for Tablets of Beloved Fearless Leader Of The Motherland 2008 Server Edition) was revealed, Microsoft went on and on about how duct-taping Metro to the classic Windows OS was all about choice and no compromise and blah blah blah. That said, they had the good sense to make the ARM version of Windows free from plug-ins. Most of us assumed that would mean Microsoft would join Apple’s fight to wrestle the web away from Adobe, but it turns out they’re compromising.

Rafael Rivera, Within Windows:

Yuck, yuck, yuck. So a half-working sorta version of Flash will be rolled into Internet Explorer 10, and Flash continues to limp its bloodied corpse forward another long, long year. This is less than happy news for those of us who fight with Flash on a daily basis. I’m sure that Windows tablets will be super fun to use, and we’ll all be punching chimps and watching splash screens for decades to come.

Source: Within Windows

It’s looking like LaCie and Seagate have entered into negotiations that would see Seagate purchasing Lacie for 146 million Euros. Based on the Forbes findings Segate plans on purchasing Philippe Spruch’s 64.5 percent stake in LaCie, then once that’s completed they will make an all-cash tender for the remaining LaCie shares:

Great for LaCie, and a pretty questionable move for Seagate. According to their press release, Seagate is essentially purchasing LaCie for its “premium-branded direct-attached storage line, strengthen our network-attached storage business line and enhance our capabilities in software development.” Whether or not that is worth the price of investment is up to Seagate, but to us it sounds like all they need is a nice external enclosure for their drives. We’re oversimplifying obviously, but are we really that far off the mark? One thing’s for certain, Seagate is about to inherit some nifty looking case enclosures.

All good things must come to an end, especially on the Internet where copyright holders are so worried about lost revenue that they DMCA everyone and everything into submission. If you’re fond of sending Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” videos to your friends when they least expect it, finding the video on YouTube just got a whole lot harder. AVG Technologies has issued a takedown request, and the original RickRoll video has been removed from YouTube.

We’re not completely sure how the company behind AVG Anti-Virus holds any copyright to a music video that’s five years old, and hopefully this is just an AVG-Roll.

For now though, it looks like the RickRoll is officially being killed off. Stupid AVG.

Via: TorrentFreak

Your DNA holds hundreds of gigabytes of data in a space so tiny you could only see it under a microscope. It’s no wonder scientists and engineers are dedicating a tremendous amount of time and energy into figuring out how to turn DNA into a data storage device.

Up until recently, bioengineers were only able to write data once to DNA, but Bioengineers at Stanford University have now discovered a way to write and rewrite data to a strand of DNA. “We can write and erase DNA in a living cell,” says Jerome Bonnet, a bioengineer at Stanford University. “Now we can bring logic and computation inside a cell itself.”

Science News explains the findings published by Stanford’s Drew Endy in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.:

I’m pretty speechless. Mostly because this stuff is WAY over my head. I’m pretty glad people a lot smarter than I are on the case of turning DNA into a storage device. We’ve been hearing for years that a test tube filled with DNA could store a heck of a lot of information if not our entire historic record. It’s pretty exciting to think of the potential storage possibilities that a device the size of a typical thumb drive could have if it was based on a DNA-like storage system. Lossless audio and raw video footage wouldn’t even be a problem, and that’s just in the consumer media market. Imagine what something like this could do in the medical industry?

If given the choice between using some crappy piece of hardware your company hands out or your own personal computer or mobile device, which would you choose? It’s pretty much a no-brainer, especially if you’re an Apple fan working in a Windows world. Apparently Big Blue (IBM) is finally catching up with the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement, and allowing their employees to bring their own preferred devices to work. But, that doesn’t mean that it’s easy sailing for its employees who are looking to take advantage of software or services they prefer over the IBMified devices. Nope, corporate IT policy is still pretty heavy-handed, and your iPhone will still get Big Blued.

IBM’s chief information officer Jeanette Horan offers a brief look at how BYOD works at IBM with MIT’s Technology Review:

Horan goes on to highlight how “conservative” the company is, and bemoans the lack of basic “awareness as to what constitutes a risk” among her employees. I’d like to suggest that if she really meant it, she’d take a moment and have her IT department explain to employees why using iCloud or Siri could be a security risk instead of disabling it on employees’ mobile devices. A simple, “people can steal our trade secrets if these services are breached” email should be sufficient and still give people the ability to ask Siri where the closest taco stand is in the area.

The best security policy is one that actually educates employees to help them make smart security decisions, not one that removes access or limits their functionality to certain applications without a basic discussion about the risks. Then again, having a smarter, more secure workforce would likely mean less IT jobs, so… there’s that.

Man, we knew people loved Siri and another group of people hated it, but when it comes down to it, it seems like we’re damn close to being split in our opinions about Siri. According to our poll last week, we found that 49.68 percent of respondents were happy with Siri on their iPhone 4S, and that 50.32 percent of those who voted didn’t think that Siri lived up to original expectations.

We’ve seen a lot of polarizing topics on Macgasm over the years, but this may be the closest split to date. It’s no wonder comments and posts around the blogosphere are so split on Siri and whether or not it’s a disappointment. Being Canadian, and the fact that Siri is pretty limited up here, I fall in the diappointed category, but that’s a pretty unfair reason for me to cast a vote in one direction over another. We simply don’t have access to everything Siri has to offer just yet.

That said, we’re really hoping Apple moves to include a lot more features in Siri in iOS 6. Rolling out an API for other developers to integrate with the service may not be something we see in the short term, but over the long term, it’s going to be crucial to the service’s success. We absolutely need more integration with popular Internet services, as well as the ability to do things like send a Tweet or post a Facebook status update directly from Siri.

Google announced today that it has officially acquired Motorola Mobility. The deal has been in the works for a while now, but had to get approval from a number of international jurisdictions, including those in Europe, China and the United States.

The acquisition will, of course, result in some turnover in the company, starting at the top. Google announced that Sanjay Jha will be stepping down as CEO of Motorola and Google executive Dennis Woodside will take over this position.

Google CEO Larry Page on the acquisition:

Motorola jumped on the Android bandwagon early, delivering handsets with the open source operating system from Google since 2009. When the acquisition was initially announced, Google indicated that they hoped the purchase of Motorola Mobility would “help supercharge Android.” Particularly attractive to Google is Motorola’s suite of wireless patents, which should help protect Android from its many patent-infringement lawsuits.

Source: Google Official Blog

The fine folks over at Sonos have introduced a brand-spanking-new subwoofer for their multi-room, wireless audio systems. The Sub is built to work in conjuncion with Sonos’ ZonePlayer system, as well as the Play:5 and Play:3 speaker systems.

The Sub system is built to fill only one room with “thick layers of deep, bottomless sound that let you hear and feel every chord, kick, splash and roll.” So, if you’re planning to set up a Sonos system throughout your house, you may want to consider a couple of these for key areas in need of better bass integration throughout your house.

The Sub also uses Sonos’ famous one-button setup that the rest of the system uses to sync your audio devices to the main network for your system.

While the Sub has been announced, you can’t walk away with one just yet. That said, the Sub is available for pre-order at $749, and it’s only available in a Black Gloss finish.