This week, Microsoft pushed out another cumulative update and reports of installation problems are widespread. While I don’t know how many users are impacted, based on comments sent to me, it’s certainly widespread enough that this is well beyond an isolated issue. The update that is causing the problem, KB3194496, is not installing correctly for users. The update, when it does fail, is causing...
If you click the source links at most of our posts about Google products, you might notice there is a lot of Google blogs. Almost every Google product has its own blog – Android, Gmail, YouTube, Chrome, Google Fiber, you name it. I think Google finally realized the need to consolidate, and has created ‘The Keyword’. The Keyword replaces the former Google company blog (googleblog.blogspot.com), which has...
HP has backtracked on a software update that blocked some ink cartridges made by third parties. A controversial firmware change made earlier this month meant HP printer owners using unofficial, usually cheaper, cartridges discovered they would no longer work. A campaign calling on HP to reverse the move was launched, backed by rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). In a blog post, HP...
Lee Cheng is one of the few attorneys to fight back against patent trolls and prevail. And at the latest Ars Live event, we talked to him about his most famous case, how people can fight patent trolls today, and what the future of patent abuse will look like in coming decades. His answers, as expected, were incredibly candid and hilarious. In 2007, a...
Amazon is already in the business of delivering packages to your door as quickly as possible, but now the company seems intent on cutting out shipping middlemen. A report by The Wall Street Journal claims that Amazon is building its own shipping service to replace FedEx and UPS, giving it more control over its packages and possibly allowing it to ship packages from other retailers....
Spotify is reportedly in advanced talks of purchasing SoundCloud, according to a report from the Financial Times. The move would give Spotify a larger library of content — SoundCloud has over 125 million songs — and remove a competitor from the streaming music landscape after SoundCloud launched its own paid service earlier this year. But outside of that the benefits of the acquisition seem limited for...
LibreOffice 5 is the most actively developed free and open source office suite, a project of The Document Foundation. It was forked from OpenOffice.org in 2010, which was an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. The LibreOffice suite comprises programs for word processing, the creation and editing of spreadsheets, slideshows, diagrams and drawings, working with databases, and composing mathematical formulae. It is available in...
7-zip is a completely free, open source file archiver for compression and decompression. 7-Zip uses its own 7z archive format, but can read and write several other archive formats. The program can be used from a command-line interface as the command p7zip, as a graphical user interface, or with a window-based shell integration. 7-Zip works in Windows 10, 8/8.1, 7, Vista, XP, 2012, 2008,...
ShareX captures or records any area of your screen at the press of a key. Free and completely open-source. ShareX is like a swiss army knife of screen capture convenience. You can take a screenshot or a screencast, upload it and get the URL copied to your clipboard with a single hotkey. ShareX supports over 50 different image, text, and file hosting services such...
Notepad++ 7.0 is a free source code editor (and Notepad replacement), which supports several programming languages, running under the MS Windows environment. This project, based on the Scintilla edit component, written in C++ with pure win32 api and STL that ensures the higher execution speed and smaller size of the program. Notepad++ supports the following languages: C, C++, Java, C#, XML, HTML, PHP, javascript,...
Recent Forum Activity