software - News, Features, and Slideshows

Tutorials

• How to sidestep Instagram's Twitter obstacle

  Instagram cut ties with Twitter this week, which means your photos will no longer display properly. Here are two workarounds that ensure your Instagram tweets will post unaltered.

• 10 Cloud Administration Must-Haves You Can't Have Yet

  A user interface can be too easy. Just ask any cloud administrator who learned the hard way that there's no undo feature. Here's our wish list for 10 things that would make a cloud admin's life much easier. Most are a few years in the making, though.

• Big Data, Cheap Storage Bring In-Memory Analytics Into Spotlight

  In-memory analytics, like virtualization and the cloud, is an old idea that's been given new life. In this case, the combination of big data, inexpensive commodity storage and parallel processing make it possible to analyze terabytes of data without slowing systems to a crawl.

• How-to: Get started with MySQL

  An easy step-by-step guide to setting up a MySQL database server, along with phpMyAdmin, on Fedora, CentOS, or Ubuntu

• Top 10 CRM Tricks Guaranteed to Lose Customers

  Best-practices articles are as dull to read as they are to write, columnist David Taber says. So here are 10 customer support system worst practices that are certain to derail customer satisfaction.

• Supporting Office 2010

  At a time when Cloud computing services for productivity tools are gaining steam, you would think that desktop software like Office 2010 would be on a downslide.

• Internet Explorer 9: A getting started guide

  Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 officially launched late Monday and is ready for download here.

• Enable iTunes Home Sharing in iOS 4.3

  The next major iOS update is slated to be released this Friday, March 11, alongside the ultra-hyped iPad 2. One of the key features is a little something called iTunes Home Sharing, which allows users to stream music, podcasts, movies and more from PC to iOS device.

• Open source FreeOTFE encrypts disks handily

  FreeOTFE may sound like a political bumper sticker, but it stands for "Free On The Fly Encryption." The "Free" part is self-explanatory; "On The Fly Encryption" refers to the encrypting/decrypting of data as it is written to or read from your hard disk.

• Digitize your movies

  Analog movies can be the easiest--or the hardest--medium to digitize, depending on the format you're working with. While older camcorder and video formats such as 8mm and Hi8 or VHS and Betamax tapes are easy to transfer, digitizing film can be difficult at best.

• Prepare your PC for future data disasters

  Reformatting and restoring a PC is not fun--in the way spending 2 hours in the dentist's chair is not fun. You have to back up all your data (and pray that you haven't forgotten anything), reformat the hard drive, install Windows, track down missing drivers, find and reload all your software, restore your data, and pull out clumps of hair over the things you inevitably neglected to save. (Firefox plug-ins, anyone?)

• Switching to desktop Linux? 6 ways to ease the migration

  With all the many compelling reasons for a company to switch to Linux on the desktop, it's no wonder that businesses large and small are increasingly relying on the free and open source operating system.

• Upload and view videos in Google Docs

  Google Docs is becoming a more robust cloud-based productivity suite, and the addition of uploading, storing and viewing videos is a boon for sharing corporate presentations and the like. It's also a slick way to skirt your company's firewall on streaming video sites such as YouTube.

• Overclock your smartphone, if you dare

  WARNING: Overclocking is not for the faint of heart. Do not attempt to hack your phone unless you understand and accept the risks of turning it into a useless "brick."

• Quick tips for speeding up Mozilla Firefox

  Read on if you've ever been frustrated by slow performance in Firefox.