One of These Things is not Like the Other
Here are the simple steps you can follow to ‘speed up’ your sluggish Android phone :
This guide provides a number of tips you can use to speed up your phone, and while not every tip will apply to you or your phone, you should find at least a few tips in here that will. Whether you've rooted your phone, overclocked, flashed a new ROM, or none of the above, you'll be able to take advantage of a number of the tweaks below to get your phone from sluggish and glitchy to quick and smooth.
And they are divided into two categories : Rooted, and Un-Rooted.
Un-Rooted First :
1. Try a New Home Screen Launcher
2. Lower the Number of Home Screens You Use And Ditch Those Widgets
3. Uninstall Misbehaving Apps
4. Uninstall or Move Apps to Free Up Space
5. Tweak Your Launcher's Memory Usage
Now for the Rooted :
1. Install a Custom ROM
2. Overclock Your Phone's Processor
3. Uninstall Crapware
4. Play With Your ROM's Advanced Settings
Now, for comparison purposes, we post the steps one must go through with an iPod Touch, iPhone, or iPad :
1. Restart your iDevice.
But what strikes us is how wrong it is to be bold enough to suggest to a user that they - in essence - stop using their Android device as a computer. Seriously. Take a look at numbers two through four in the Un-Rooted section. They are suggestions to, in so many words, quit using your Android smartphone as a smartphone.
Never have we seen a suggestion coming from Apple that enhances performance through the suggestion that you quit using your iOS device for it’s intended purpose. Or, similarly, to quit using your iOS device as a portable computer. We continue to be shocked and amazed at the crap people will wade through when there are much easier solutions to be had.
Then again, we must shake our heads in disbelief every time we hear how ‘open’ Android is when not every Android device can stream Netflix, yet every iOS device does.
That’ll show Apple!
AT Does ACTC
We are pleased to announce Aquariant Technologies now has an ACTC on staff.
We stand prepared to solve all your Apple problems today!
Another Adobe Security Flaw
Can we puh-lease stop referring to Adobe with any word that has any meaning remotely connected to security?
Adobe today confirmed that hackers are exploiting a critical unpatched bug in Flash Player, and promised to patch the vulnerability in two weeks.
The company issued a security advisory that also named Adobe Reader and Acrobat as vulnerable.
"There are reports that this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild against Adobe Reader and Acrobat," said Adobe in its warning. The company said it's seen no sign that hackers are also targeting Flash Player itself.
So how does one protect a computer from being pwned by Adobe’s insecure software? By disabling the software you depend on :
Security experts have regularly criticized Adobe Flash's security, with some questioning the company's decision to integrate the media player's capabilities within the almost-as-popular Reader. Adobe has countered those arguments with its own, saying that many users rely on the functionality.
Until a patch is available, users can protect themselves from active attacks by deleting the "authplay.dll" file that ships with Reader and Acrobat. It gave the same advice in June when the earlier Flash vulnerability was reported.
Dumping authplay.dll, however, will crash Reader and Acrobat or produce an error message when the software opens a PDF file containing Flash content.
So the choices are :
1. Use Adobe software and let your computer be pwned by an as-yet-anonymous ‘hacker’
OR
2. Disable the software, and not be able to use it.
Remind us again... why does anyone use Adobe software?
We Want Schmidt's Head !
Google would like you to know they grabbed way more private information than they first let on, but it was completely, totally accidental :
Google Inc said its "Street View" cars around the world accidentally collected more personal data than previously disclosed, and that it was changing its privacy practices.
Regulators in some of the more than 30 countries where the cars operated are looking into the issue.Google's Street View cars, which are well known for crisscrossing the globe and taking panoramic pictures of the city's streets, collected the data. The company displays the pictures in its online street maps.
Google said it wants to delete the data as soon as possible. It disclosed the snafu in May, but said at the time that the information it collected was typically limited to "fragments" of data because the cars were always moving.
Well, if by “fragments” you meant “entire e-mails” or “passwords”, then it appears Google fragmented the hell out of the landscape. And after this massive breech of trust and invasion of privacy we have to trust them Google won’t ever, ever do it again :
Google said it has appointed Alma Whitten as director of privacy for engineering and product management, and that the company was adding new internal procedures requiring engineering product managers to maintain a privacy design document that records how user data is handled.
Google also said it was enhancing its privacy training for engineers and other important groups within the company.
But the most damning evidence, and one that would send a chill racing up the spine of any rational person, is this :
.Google said collecting the additional data was a mistake resulting from a piece of computer code from an experimental project that was accidentally included
So Google is experimenting with means to invade our privacy? Except for an incompetent engineer or thirty, we would not have any clue that Google was building the tools to invade privacy at will. And if it was bad in the spring, and worse now, what would it be like if we could force full, honest, and transparent disclosure from Google?
Are we alone, or does that whole ‘don’t be evil’ thing just appear to be a B.S. marketing slogan right now?
Mostly Dead
Computerworld predicts the obvious, that being Apple is sounding the death knell of hard drives :
When Apple CEO Steve Jobs this week introduced a slimmer version of the MacBook Air, an ultra-portable laptop without a traditional hard disk drive, he said it represents "the future of notebooks." Several industry observers agree.
Beginning with MP3 players, NAND flash technology in the form of solid state drives (SSD) has been devouring the consumer hard drive market from the bottom up as prices go down.
And, while hard disk drives will still populate servers and storage systems in corporate data centers for years to come, there will be fewer of them as solid state drives cannibalize the top tiers of data storage there.
Of course Solid-state drives will be the future. There are really is no down-side to them besides cost. They are more rugged than hard-drives, faster, silent, smaller and have far lower power-consumption than hard drives. What’s not to like?
But Apple has - historically speaking - always led the way in the computer industry. Many things all computer users take for granted are Apple inventions, such as the track pad. And we wouldn’t be using USB today had it not been for Apple.
Truly, it has been said if you want to know what the rest of the industry will be doing next year, look to Apple this year. Still, that doesn’t mean anyone is going to listen. After all, even when Apple held a funeral for Mac OS 9, it took some Mac developers years to get the hint.
We believe it will be inevitable that the industry shift to SSDs. The only question to be answered is : how long will it take?
