July 29th, 2010
Supercharge your WordPress-powered site with these plug-ins.
Content creators have flocked to WordPress since its 2003 debut (version 3.0 alone has been downloaded over 10 million times since its June release) due to its ease of setup and use. Over the last seven years, a rich universe of plug-ins has emerged, giving the already user-friendly publishing platform the extra flexibility to tweak SEO, the ability to display popular posts, and much more.
There are over 10,300 plug-ins available at the current count, which can make it a chore to discover plug-ins that would be beneficial to your site. If you visit WordPress’ Most Popular Plug-in Directory to see the top 15 most download plug-ins of the moment, you’ll find some great stuff. But there are plenty of other great plug-ins that don’t make the list.
We’ve dug through the site and created our own list of a dozen that will help your WordPress-powered site perform like a champ. Please note: Plug-ins can only be installed in self-hosted WordPress sites—if WordPress.com is your host, you won’t be able to add plug-ins. If you’re ready to super-charge your WordPress installation, check out these 12 can’t-miss plug-ins. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Opinion | No Comments »
July 20th, 2010
The rumors of a $149 price tag for Microsoft’s Kinect accessory for the Xbox 360 were true.
Microsoft on Tuesday finally announced the pricing for both a standalone Kinect bundle, which will ship with the Kinect hardware and the Kinect Adventures game for $149, as well as a bundle of the Xbox 360 hardware, a Kinect unit, and Kinect Adventures for $299.
Rumors of the $149 price tag began circulating months ago, and were all but confirmed just a week after E3 when Microsoft’s own online store listed the peripheral for that price, despite the company not yet announcing it. Earlier reports had pegged it as low as $80, and as high as $200.
Along with the pricing on the Kinect hardware, Microsoft is also releasing a replacement for its Arcade console bundle that uses the same smaller, and quieter form factor introduced at the end of Microsoft’s E3 press briefing. The new unit, which can be found in the $299 Kinect console bundle, as well as on its own for $199, ships with 4GB of built-in Flash memory, and features a matte paint job instead of the high-gloss finish found in the current Xbox 360 “S” units. The console will otherwise remain the same as the $299 Xbox unit, with front and back USB ports, a Kinect-specific I/O port, and built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi.
According to Microsoft director of product management Aaron Greenberg, who spoke to CNET on Monday, the new version of the Xbox 360 has been “selling quite well.” The console has been on the shelves a little more than a month, but it’s already jumped to first place in console sales. Greenberg pointed to data from The NPD Group for the month of June that pegged sales just north of 452,000 units, putting it on top of Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Nintendo’s Wii, despite those consoles having a two-and-a-half-week lead.
As for why Microsoft didn’t announce Kinect pricing at last month’s E3, Greenberg said it was due to not wanting to oversaturate its press briefing with too much news. “We had a tremendous amount of news,” Greenberg said. “We had to unveil the Kinect name, all the experiences, and the brand new consoles. We had more than enough to talk about there.”
Kinect, and the new 4GB console are shipping worldwide on November 3.
Posted in Reviews | No Comments »
July 15th, 2010
Need to get a new network up and running quickly? Follow our our step-by-step guide.
A computer network is an essential element of modern business, and it’s increasingly indispensible in the home, too. A network lets your computer connect to the Web so that you can check e-mail, update a website, or teleconference. It also lets you communicate locally with other computers on the same local network. Creating a network is simple—all that’s needed is to connect a computer to a router with an Ethernet cable. That’s a very rudimentary setup, however. You’ll need other components if you want to add multiple computers to your network, share files, stream multimedia, share a printer, or control which computers can access data on the network. And complexity increases if you decide that some links in your network will be made wirelessly. Fortunately, we’re here to assist. We’ve gathered together a list of all gear you’ll need to quickly and easily set up a home or small home-office network, and some key hints for getting it all to work together. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in How to ! | 4 Comments »
July 14th, 2010
Dell has a lot of catch-up to do when it comes to creating cool devices like Apple has. A key piece of that strategy is the Dell Streak tablet, a tablet device that has a 5-inch multitouch touchscreen and can make web phone calls. Read the rest of this entry »
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July 13th, 2010
Bolstered by the success of Windows 7, Microsoft is looking forward to the next Windows. Early signs are that it might be a business-focused release, much like Windows 2000.
Could Windows 8 be the Windows 2000 of the 21st century? When Microsoft released Windows 2000, it was largely embraced by the corporate world, but few consumers (except hard-core geeks) ran it on their home machines. Windows 95, Windows 98, and the doomed Windows Millennium targeted the average user. A decade later, rumors and hints point to a Windows 8 that appears poised to walk the same business-centric path.
The successor to Windows 7 is probably a few years from release, but there’s already considerable speculation on what the upcoming operating system will entail. A post at Ma-Config, a French tech news site, has piqued OS-watchers’ interests, as it hinted at Windows 8′s potential business-friendly features. Analysts, including ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley, are pondering the heavy focus on virtualization due to certain statements made on the French blog:
Virtual machines (VMs) become key platform components for data centers and Microsoft products such as Win8, System Center, and Azure.
On the website of Microsoft Research, we learn that virtualization should be one of the key components of Windows 8. It seems to confirm that Bernard Ourghanlian, technical and security director at Microsoft France, interviewed on the site itrmanager in March 2009. Version 3 Hyper-V is now scheduled run on workstations and Windows 8 only.
Virtualization is certainly one of the more intriguing potential Windows 8 features, one that could drastically improve the IT/developer, business user, and cloud-computing experiences. Here are the potential improvements that Windows 8′s virtualization can bring to the business sector. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Tech News | 7 Comments »
July 12th, 2010
Back in June, YouTube r
eleased an experimental tool that had been long asked for by its users: a browser-based video editor. The tool, which requires no additional software, or browser plug-ins (besides Adobe’s Flash), lets users make minor edits to videos they’ve uploaded, as well as stitch several clips together into one.
While it lacks many basic features of modern day consumer video editing software (such as captioning, transitions, and image stabilization), it makes up for it in convenience. All your video files, and the rendering, is taken care of by YouTube’s server farm, meaning you can do some very involved HD video editing on older machines that would be otherwise woefully inadequate.
YouTube has its own introductory guide on what the editor’s various features are, but we thought it would be a good idea to walk you through how to create something, as if you had just come back to your computer with a digital camera full of clips you wanted to put into one, cohesive video. Read on to see how to do it. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in How to ! | 4 Comments »
July 6th, 2010
Panasonic plasmas sure do.
(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)
Initial testing of 3D-compatible HDTVs has revealed that, in the default picture settings, displaying 3D images can indeed draw more power than in standard 2D mode, especially on plasma models.
We tested four televisions, namely Panasonic’s 50-inch TC-P50VT25 and 65-inch TC-P65VT25 plasmas, as well as two LED-based LCD models, the Samsung UN55C8000 and the Sony XBR-52HX909. The results show that the plasmas used 62 and 101 percent more power, respectively, whereas the Samsung used 29 percent more and the Sony, oddly, used more power in 2D than in 3D mode. Check out the measurements below. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Products | 5 Comments »
June 29th, 2010
OnLive could be one of the most disruptive gaming technologies since Steam.
The much-hyped OnLive PC gaming service has soft-launched to a limited preview audience, and we’ve spent the past several days putting the streaming service through its paces. OnLive allows nearly any laptop or desktop to play high-end PC games, by offloading the CPU and GPU-intensive tasks of actually running the game software to a remote render farm, then beaming the gameplay back to you as a streaming video.
As unlikely as that scenario sounds, in practice the system actually works quite well, at least at these initial stages. The game selection is decent, the hardware requirements are very flexible, and the overall image quality and gameplay experience runs from acceptable to very good. The big question mark in OnLive’s future is how well the system will scale for a mass audience. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Reviews | 5 Comments »
June 27th, 2010
You’ve outgrown Picasa and iPhoto, so, what next? These pro-level photo workflow applications give photographers a way to organize and optimize large collections of images.
If you’re serious about digital photography, it’s a given that you shoot with a D-SLR or maybe one of the new compact interchangeable-lens cameras. And you shoot a lot of photos. But you haven’t only outgrown your point-and-shoot camera, you’ve also outgrown your consumer photo application. These apps offer rudimentary photo-management and are becoming more and more capable photo editors all the time, but when it comes to importing, rating, tagging, optimizing, and outputting myriad high-resolution image files, they can’t compete with the professional photo workflow programs in this roundup: Apple’s Aperture 3 ($199), Adobe’s Lightroom 3 ($299), and ACDSee Pro 3 ($169.99). These photo-workflow apps take you through the whole import-organize-optimize-output process. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Products | 5 Comments »
