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Everyone agrees that the release of apps for the iphone and iPod touch has been a huge net positive, and though the App Store continues to have well-documented problems, it's great that there's a central place to search and buy software. Yet due to an unexpected feature-the ability to "Update" apps after purchase-the App Store made a major change to consumer expectations for both Apple and third-party software:.

If you think you'd have liked it in 1969, either you weren't there or you've forgotten what was invented since. Is it because we're unhappy with what we now have?Are you excited by the Apollo moon landing - more precisely, the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the takeoff and successful landing and return of the Apollo 11 mission and its crew? There's been no shortage of places to watch and follow it, from wechoosethemoon (named after Kennedy's famous phrase from his speech in September 1962) to CAPCOM (the person talking to the astronauts from the Canaveral Space Centre) on Twitter. There's an astronauts' get-together (though it seems Neil Armstrong isn't prepared to take even one small step out of his house to go there.) It's complete immersion. And we're certainly not immune here at the Guardian.What more could you want? Yet I suspect that what many of the people oohing and aahing over the achievements of 40 years ago really want is something unachievable: to be able to be tran

The new Olympus Tough-6010 is designed to go with to places you wouldn't normally take a digital camera promises the makers.

SEATTLE (AP) -- The technology sector is often talked about as if it were a unified front, an easy-to-define monolith. People say technology stocks rose or technology stocks fell. Tech helped drive a huge boom in the 1990s, and when that collapsed in 2001, tech contributed to the last recession....

Most people assume that their trash ends up in a landfill somewhere far away (if they think about this at all). But growing concern over the environmental impact of waste--discarded electronics, in particular--has prompted a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to take a high-tech approach to studying exactly what people are tossing out and where those items are ending up. [More] Sponsored Topics: Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Landfill - Waste - Waste management - MIT

Barence writes 'Internet Explorer 8 will no longer replace the default browser when a user selects the 'Use express settings' option during installation. Back in May, Mozilla and Opera accused microsoft of force-feeding users internet explorer 8 through the Automatic Updates process. The object of their ire was the 'Use express settings' option which automatically sets Internet Explorer 8 as the default browser. The option was already ticked when Automatic Updates offered users the choice to upgrade their browser. 'We heard a lot of feedback from a lot of different people and groups and decided to make the user choice of the default browser even more explicit,' notes Microsoft in a blog post.' of this story at Slashdot.

With persistent reports about hacker attacks, compromised privacy and phishing scams, social networks can be scary places. But that doesn't mean the corporate world should run. IT managers can establish policies that protect corporate network and data security without shutting out social networks altogether. Here are some of the issues IT managers should keep in mind when dealing with social networks. - Social networking is an important part of the lives of most Web surfers After people get home from work, they go to their computers, see what their friends are up to on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, and go about their lives. There's just one problem: those social networks are being hit hard w...

Seeing microsoft's latest attempt to take a chunk out of Yahoo - this time, to in effect take over its search advertising business - I'm reminded of one of Bob Monkhouse's lines: 'Everyone laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well, they're not laughing now.' Everyone did indeed laugh when microsoft made its $44.6bn bid for Yahoo in February 2008; principally inside Yahoo, where they had financial projections which suggested that the company would be worth far more within a short period of time.Unfortunately, as anyone outside Yahoo could have told them, the projections were nonsense - made when the credit crunch had barely begun to bite, and when people assumed that online advertising would continue to grow without end, swallowing up all the money being spent on TV, radio, print and other outlets until it was the only form. Jerry Yang, then head of Yahoo, turned the deal down, and despite Microsoft's chief executive Steve Ballmer repeatedly trying to talk some financial sense

Microsoft Bing increased its U.S. search engine market share by 0.4 percent during its first month of release, putting it third in the search-engine arena behind Google and Yahoo, both of which enjoy substantial leads. Although microsoft has committed heavily to Bing with a multimillion-dollar ad campaign, earning a great deal of media attention in the process, reports suggest that it has yet to see a substantial uptick in paid search spend. - Microsoft Bing gained market share in the U.S. search marketplace in June, according to a new report released by ComScore. Bings gain was 0.4 percent for the month, giving it 8.4 percent of the market ? placing it in third behind Google, which occupied 65 percent of the market, and Yahoo, ...

One little solar cooker aims to take a big bite out of climate change. The Kyoto Box, designed by Norwegian entrepreneur Jon Bøhmer, is intended as an alternative for millions of people who burn wood to cook food and boil water. Using energy from the sun can reduce carbon emissions as well as deforestation in countries such as Kenya, where Bøhmer lives and runs his company, Kyoto Energy.Bøhmer experimented with the concept for a decade, inspired by the simplicity of a solar device invented in 1767 by Swiss physicist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure. The cooker, which consists of two boxes nestled inside each other and topped with Plexiglas to trap the sun’s rays, has evolved from a homemade cardboard contraption to a $6 plastic version that went into mass production this spring. [More] Sponsored Topics: An Inconvenient Truth - Kenya - Greenhouse gas - Solar cooker - Environment