Microsoft has announced that customers buying computers with Windows 7, the new version of the world’s most popular operating system, installed will be allowed the option of downgrading the system. Downgrade options are a fairly longstanding feature that Microsoft has allowed as part of their license on particular versions of the OS for years now, though the option only gained notoriety after the release of Vista.
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These days it seems YouTube gets more professional by the day. The site has been moving away from its amateur, homemade roots for a while now, though the pace has accelerated over the last six months or so, which have seen legitimate music content hit its channels, HD content, even a downloadable speech from President Obama. Now it seems that another frontier is about to be broken by YouTube, full length feature films.
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Of course, the charge against Twitter as a search engine is that it’s mainly short emotional responses to things, though that could also be a strength. If you want to find out hard facts then Google exists though if you want to get a general sense of how something is going down in society then Twitter is a godsend. It would take you hours of reading traditional blogs before you got half the range of opinions you would from five minutes of Twitter searching.
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These days we’re used to Google trying things that don’t quite have an obvious profit model. Stuff like Google Earth, their space exploration competition, the whole non-profit wing, to name but a few. Since rumours that Google were thinking about buying Twitter surfaced the blogs have been awash with comments of the ‘here they go again’ variety, denouncing the move as a vanity purchase, or an impulse buy.
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Well, I suppose it was only a matter of time. TechCrunch has it from two separate sources that they’re describing as ‘close to the negotiations,’ that Google are about to buy micro-blogging site Twitter. According to the normally reliable technology blog, the search engine giant in the latter stages of a deal that would see them take possession of one of the hottest properties on the Internet.
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If you’ve been paying attention to the tech press over the last few days, you might have seen the slightly sensationalised claims about the Conficker.c Worm. For the uninitiated, the Conficker.c Worm is the computer security threat that has been built into an apocalyptic scare over the last few days. The Conficker.c Worm is a risk, in fact it’s the largest botnet ever seen though people’s fears have been overblown over the last few days.
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