In a world where the government can at any time subpoena search engine data it’s growing more important for companies to think of new ways to protect their users. Ask.com, which has a history of innovation has a neat function called AskEraser. Since the most widely used search engine is currently Google, it’s important for smaller search engines to offer such extra features. Ask has always been keeping us excited with features such as their thumbnail picture view and unique search results layout
It’s important to remember that all the big players retain your search data when you search through their site. Basic information such as user agent, IP, and search queries are saved. So which company is keeping your data the longest? Google holds on to theirs for 18 months, followed by Yahoo who retain it for 13 months. In fact Ask.com is the only major player that will allow you to control data retention. It should be noted that if the eraser is not used, the data will be retained for 18 months - matching Google.
As well as subpoena’s, your data can be compromised in a variety of ways. Many of the terms of service including Google’s tell you the data may be sold to third party companies. AOL learned it’s lesson after releasing the data of 600k users to the public. This so called “anonymized” data lead to the finding of multiple people who searched for very specific things.
It’s the only PDF file you’ll ever need to open, so why download Adobe’s PDF viewer? That’s the motto the folks at samurajdata had when creating their online PDF reader.
It’s as simple as it gets. Either enter in the web address of the PDF, or upload it to their servers from your computer. Their software will then present your document in a viewable form in your web browser. There are only a few options you have to manipulate the PDF, and those include zoom, tilt, and page next. I said it was simple right?
The best part about the whole thing is it’s free. Not only is it free, it’s open source. You can visit their main page for the latest version of their source code.
I downloaded the source code for it. It appears to be quite simple, utilizing linux shell scripts to decode the PDF. However, this presents a two downsides. One being the fact that it requires a linux server and the other being it requires a MySql database.
Overall it appears to be a highly useful script. If they actually do some of the things in their To Dos it will have a much greater value. Current it’s limited to only 256 colors, and the user interface is extremely basic. A great feature would include the ability to edit the PDFs and download the new version.
No matter how interesting the iPhone looks every time you see it on TV or your local Mac store, save your money. Although the fanboy dubbed JesusPhone is a break through in technological advancement, it falls short in so many ways that just make it the most impractical tool for anyone who needs or wants a smartphone. Looking at the list of features it boasts, all of the audio and video playback options are included in a regular iPod, with 8 to 16 times the storage space. E-mail, SMS, Notes, and Calendar all suffer from a lack of cut & paste or the ability to delete multiple items. Picture my dismay when I first set up a Gmail account and every message in my inbox, including my responses to it flooded my phone. Manually deleting 40 e-mails was almost as fun as re-writing the same message to about 10 contacts who had replied back to me. Even the Safari browser with its ability to utilize both EDGE and Wi-Fi is gimped thanks to a denial that it’s a mobile device and EDGE being phased out close to two years ago now. If the iPhone Safari browser is what they claim it is, why do we need “iPhone optimized” websites? What’s worse is trying to use EDGE to run the Maps or YouTube application. Let me know how well it works for you when your $400 (or $600 in my case) iPhone is relying on EDGE connection to triangulate your general area because you got lost.
You will hear people saying that these are not issues as the iPhone is so new, but how can you launch a smartphone without cut & paste? Update after update, the iPhone continues to skip the most basic of features. With plenty of interesting applications being released to the modding scene only, most people haven’t even seen what the iPhone is capable of and besides, why should you have to modify your iPhone to take advantage of what it should have done out of the box? No matter how cool it is, the iPhone is anything but practical.
First arriving in the mail a week ago, the Helio Ocean is one of the best phones I’ve ever used. The sleek pull out qwerty keyboard is easy to handle and still compact. The many features to keep in touch with the outside world are user friendly and run extremely fast on Sprint’s 3G network. The numerous Ocean features appear to stop the iPhone and alike phones in their tracks.
Helio designed the Ocean with young people in mind. They made popular sites such as MySpace, Digg, and Flickr easy to use. You can upload pictures or videos to your Helio UP account in seconds. Once there it can be sent directly to Youtube or Flickr. There is a toggle to automatically upload the media once it’s placed on an UP account. One downside to the image upload is the resolutions appear to be cut down smaller. There’s also a nasty Helio logo in the bottom left of the image. Other means of retrieval eliminate the logo and the small resolution. However that requires you to hook the phone up to your computer with the included cord.
Keeping in touch is of course easy with the Ocean’s built in Email clients. It supports basic email websites such as Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, and Earth Link. It downloads and parses through new emails quite fast; sometimes in seconds. You can send, delete, and read emails easily on the screen because of its perfect layout.
The camera quality on the Ocean is superb, taking brilliant high resolution pictures. The camera comes with a built in flash which can be toggled on/off/auto. The cameras take excellent pictures in the light (natural or lights), and pretty decent ones in dimmer light. However, once you hit night, the flash is almost useless. The only downside of the camera I see is the awkward placing of the lens. My fingers always seem to be right in front of it while trying to take a picture.
The Helio’s qwerty keyboard is a bit awkward to use at first. However, within a few minutes you’ll be typing extremely fast. Never have I typed on such an easy to use keyboard on a cell phone. In my opinion this keyboard is more comfortable and practical than that of a sidekick.
Internet on the Helio is about the same as any other phone. The screen is extremely small and not the easiest to navigate. However it’s good if you need to get some quick information. Pages load on the 3G network relatively fast. Pages like Google load in seconds, but pages like eBay take as long as 20 seconds. Upon loading it automatically parses the web page for a phone’s resolution. Clicking the up area reloads the page like it was intended to be loaded. This is a pretty cool feature on news sites where you just want to read the article.
The Helio’s mp3 player is a bit disappointing. It plays music and videos fine, however, you can’t make or receive calls while listening to music. In fact you can’t text message or do anything while listening to music! This is a huge flaw in my opinion. I don’t want to have to stop a song just to respond to a text message or something. For this reason I rarely use the music player.
Another thing on the Ocean that is troubling is it freezes a lot. Sometimes when doing a few things at once it will lag and take 1-20 seconds to go back to normal. During this time the screen will freeze on the same frame no matter what you do. This doesn’t happen often, maybe once a day or so. Another downside is when you exit out of the internet it has to load back your desktop. The longer you were using the internet, the longer it takes to load. It gets to be a pain when you want to make a call directly after that.
Helio rents out Sprint’s cell phone towers to provide their service. The reception in my area was average or below average. It did however make calls in most areas that I went to. The biggest trouble I have with it is reception in basements - where it started to get choppy. My old Verizon phone performed fine in such areas, thus I expected Sprint to. The internet on the Ocean is fairly fast when you have good reception. Even when you’re not equipped with full bars, it’s still pretty fast.
Overall the Helio is a pretty above average phone. The unlimited media features combined with the sleekly designed phone secure it as a competitor to the iPhone. While still a new phone, it has little things wrong with it. There are only a handful of things that I’d change on it.
This is one of my last themes - Mellow Blue. It’s a simple two column theme with hints of green. The main post area is white, and the rest of it is blue. This theme is widget ready and coded for the latest Wordpress. To view a demo or download the theme, see the Wordpress theme website. This theme has three sponsors: MySpace Codes, IntelligentObject Directory, and Ventrilo. As usual, sponsor links aren’t required, but it’s always nice to keep them on there. Enjoy this theme and comment if you’d like to sponsor my last theme.