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The analysts are telling us that PC sales are down. They would have us believe that soon we will all be exclusively using tablets and smartphones — that is wrong of course, but the computer market slump cannot be argued. With that fact in mind, manufacturers like Dell, Asus and Lenovo must look for new revenue streams.

It seems HP is actively pursuing this, and today announces a move into the greeting and gift card market. TwoSmiles is a new site that lets customers create a personalized gift at home for their family and friends for any holiday or celebration. The site allows users to choose from artist-created greeting card designs, pick a retailer and gift card amount, and personalize the greeting.

“TwoSmiles by HP offers hundreds of premium-quality designs to choose from for any occasion or special event, including birthdays, Mother’s Day and graduations. Printing a TwoSmiles card is easy with HP Easy Print: users simply select the printer and paper size then hit print directly from their browser” the company claims.

Obviously prices vary based on the value of the gift card selected, but it begins at $25. Given that gift cards are a top choice these days — none of us seems to know what to buy anyone — this could actually be a viable source of income for the PC manufacturer, as gouging us for ink cartridges is apparently not enough.

In a tragic accident in Oregon, a man fell into an industrial-sized blender at a meat packing plant last Friday while cleaning it and died.

41-year old Hugo Avalos-Chanon, an employee of DCS Sanitation Management, died of blunt-force trauma and “chopping wounds” after becoming tangled up in the blender. Officials say there was an emergency stop button, but by the time another employee was able to push it, Avalos-Chanon was already dead. Firefighters had to dismantle the blender to remove his body.

Authorities say the man’s death was a tragic workplace accident, but are still conducting an investigation and are looking into why the machinery wasn’t shut down during cleaning; it is unclear at this time what caused the blender to start up while Avalos-Chanon was working on it.

‘‘It’s way too early to say,’’ OSHA spokesperson Melanie Mesaros said. ‘‘We’re just starting our investigation, which could take six months.’’

A tiny humanoid skeleton found in Chile’s Atacama Desert has been hailed by UFO conspiracists for years as proof of extraterrestrial life. Now, actual science has proven that the skeleton, as with all currently known life, originated on Earth.

According to a LiveScience report, researchers at the Stanford School of Medicine have used DNA testing on the fossilized skeleton. Despite the figure being only 6 inches long, the testing revealed that it comes from a human who was 6 to 8 years old when they died.

The researchers have not yet determined what deformities may have led to the obviously strange skeletal figure. The age of the skeleton has also not yet been determined, though the current estimate is that the person it belonged to died “at least a few decades ago.”

The tiny skeleton is featured prominently in a new documentary by noted UFO conspiracist Steven Greer, titled Sirius.

Judging from the movie’s trailer, Greer isn’t too interested in proving that extraterrestrials exist – he takes that as a given. Instead, he seeks to expose a purported conspiracy of corporate interests and oil conglomerates to keep alien technology a secret

There is something poignant, and unnervingly beautiful about this. It’s also incredibly depressing in a way. Google’s autocomplete feature uses algorithms to suggest queries based on their popularity with other users, so when Google is suggesting something to you, just know that a whole hell of a lot of people have search it before you.

And that’s what makes this so…just…yeah:

“Using billions of searches, Google has prototyped an anonymous profile of its users. This reflects the fears, inquiries, preoccupations, obsessions and fixations of the human being at a certain age and our evolution through life,” says creator Marius B. Well said.

And just FYI, he made this video in a incognito window with no user signed in, no cookies, and with a deleted history. This is pretty much the human condition, visualized via Google autocomplete. Life really is all about sex.

[Marius B via reddit]

Back in March, the Wall Street Journal reported that Yahoo was about to buy a controlling stake in French video site Dailymotion. The company was in said to be in for as much as 75% of the company.

The Journal is now reporting that this is not happening, though the companies were evidently in talks. Sam Schechner and Amir Efrati report:

At an April 12 meeting in Mr. Montebourg’s Paris office, the minister told Yahoo’s chief operating officer, Henrique de Castro, and France Télécom’s chief financial officer, Gervais Pellissier, that he didn’t want 75% of a rare French Internet success story to be sold to an American Web giant, according to people briefed on the meeting.

“I won’t let you sell one of France’s best startups,” Mr. Montebourg told Mr. Pelissier, his voice raised, according to people briefed on the meeting. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

Both Yahoo and Dailymotion are keeping quiet on the whole thing.

This could have been a major acquisition for Yahoo, which has not been shy about acquiring companies since Marissa Mayer took over. Perhaps the most important acquisition so far has been that of Summly, which Yahoo quickly integrated into its new apps for iOS and Android.

Image: Google Talks Archive (YouTube)

PRO’s: Beautifully styled, comfortable and sporty interior that’s loaded with tech. Strong V8 offers great performance.

CON’s: Vague steering, high price tag.

FINAL THOUGHT: A nicely appointed sports-sedan that offers plenty of performance and luxury with a image that’s a big departure from its German rivals.

When you think of a mid-sized performance sedan, the odds of a BMW 5-series popping into your head would probably be pretty good. However there is another vehicle out there that’s trying to encroach on the 5-series dominance. It’s imported from Japan and comes in the form of this – the 2013 Infiniti M56. On paper you’ll notice that all the correct bells and whistles are in place. It’s got a big V8, rear-wheel drive performance and thanks to the optional technology package, has just about every option you’d ever want. However, does all of this power and tech make for a good and sporty automobile? Click through to find out.

The M56 has remained virtually unchanged since its last redesign in 2011. One look will tell you that it’s decidedly Japanese. It’s lines are free flowing and possess a very organic feel, which is something that continues all the way through the cars interior. Under the hood lies a 5.6-liter V8 that produces 420 hp and 417 lb-ft of torque that’s put down through a smooth shifting 7-speed automatic transmission. This particular M56 was also fitted with the optional Sport Package. A $5,650.00 option that gets you things like 20-inch aluminum wheels, active 4-wheel steering, a sport-tuned suspension, better seats and a kick-ass 16-speaker BOSE audio system.

On the road the 2013 Infiniti M56 is almost as good as you’d expect from a $70,000 sports sedan. However it’s not great, which is really what I was hoping for. The suspension comes with two settings, STANDARD and SPORT. STANDARD does an “okay” job of soaking up road imperfections, however those 20-inch rims and low 40-series tires unfortunately still let a few bumps sneak through.

SPORT mode stiffens up everything from the steering to the suspension, however there was still a pretty noticeable disconnect and vagueness through the steering wheel. Throwing the car hard into bends meant putting your trust into the engineers as opposed to the car itself, something that is a bit hard to do when driving at the upper limits. Now don’t get me wrong, this thing does handle quite well, so take that comment with a grain of salt.

Acceleration from the 5.6-liter V8 is brisk and launches you to 60 mph in just a tick over 5-seconds. Very respectable considering the M56 weighs in at over 4,000 lbs. The brakes are equally impressive and bring the M56 down from speed with very little drama or nose dive.

Once inside you’ll see why the M56 has such a dedicated audience. Fit and finish is spot-on and all the materials used are of high quality. The center stack for instance looks as though it came directly from the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. Sitting dead-center is a nicely sized touch screen that can be activated manually through use of the control knob or via a simple touch. It’s not as intuitive as other systems out there, but it won’t take you a decade to figure out either.

The optional 10-speaker BOSE audio system sounds outstanding and will cut audio instantly in the event you receive a call via the hands-free Bluetooth system. Combine that with the fact that you can control all of the vehicles audio, navigation and communication options through the steering wheel and via voice activation, and the system becomes one that you’ll find yourself relying on constantly.

Other notable options like the heated and ventilated seats, heated steering wheel and paddle shifted transmission are also nice touches and things that you’ll become used to very quickly.

When it comes to comfort the M56 doesn’t disappoint. Driver and passenger are treated to wonderfully supportive seats, as are the passengers in the rear. Even the door panels are nicely sculpted and visually, help to truly enhance the overall feel of the M56.

And now for the answer to the question of: Is the 2013 Infiniti a true sports sedan, or simply a nicely appointed luxury sedan with sporty features?

Answer: The 2013 Infiniti M56 is a true sports sedan. It’s not as crisp or engaging as some other models out there, but all the right pieces of the puzzle are there and they do work well together. Therefore, if a new sports sedan is in your future, the 2013 Infiniti M56 is definitely a car you should check out.

Jony Ive’s effort to overhaul the design of the next version of iOS — which is said to include fewer real-life textures throughout, along with new email and calendar apps — may be more than the iOS team can handle on its own. According to Bloomberg’s account, Apple’s rush to finish iOS 7 for a September launch has meant bringing in members from the Mac software group.

Ive is said to be making the first major design changes to iOS since its introduction in 2007. 9to5Mac reported earlier that the next version will have “very, very flat” design, which means more like Microsoft’s Windows Metro UI than Apple’s current preference for more realistic representations of objects, with 3D, shadowing and textured effects.

As part of his new duties, Bloomberg says Ive is looking over everything, including some of the software’s core applications — Mail and Calendar — as well as “methodically reviewing new designs.”

Designers and developers on Apple’s platform have begun to move ahead with flatter designs of their own over the past year, in some cases making iOS’s preference for overly stylized apps look more dated. And competitors large and small, from Google and Facebook, down to tiny two-person development shops, have innovated on the most basic apps of the iPhone and iPad. So it’s really no surprise that Apple feels the need to rethink its design approach in 2013.

But all this has meant Mac team members have “been roped in to help the mobile software group finish the job,” Bloomberg reports.

It’s not clear what will this mean for the next version of OS X: it is also expected to at least be introduced at WWDC along with iOS 7, and if it follows the pattern of the last few years, it would be on track for a mid-to-late summer launch. The last time Apple had to bring Mac team members over to help finish a version of iOS before its introduction it resulted in a delayed introduction to OS X 10.5 Leopard — the same year the original version of iOS debuted.

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AT&T is about to ramp up the competition to become the most widely-covered LTE network in the country.  The company recently announced that it has added 17 new regions for LTE coverage and is expanding coverage in 9 regions. AT&T’s stated goal of having 300 million LTE points of presence by the end of the year is certainly getting closer to becoming very doable and its new coverage additions clearly help their case.

AT&T currently features 207 regions with their LTE coverage.  The 17 added regions include: Cullman, AL, Decatur, AL, Huntsville, AL; Mountain Home, AR; Lake City, FL, Ocala, FL; Shreveport-Bossier City, LA; Lansing, MI; Biloxi-Gulfport, MS; Henderson, NC; Chattanooga, TN; Athens, TX, Corsicana, TX, Huntsville, TX, Lufkin-Nacogdoches, TX, Paris, TX; and Centralia, WA.

The 9 regions that AT&T is expanding upon include: Little Rock, AR, Ouachita/Monticello, AR; Phoenix, AZ, Tucson, AZ; Kansas City, MO/KS; Nashua, NH; Harrisburg, PA; Florence, SC; and Jackson, TN.

A solid job done here by AT&T, but they certainly have their work cut out for them.  Check back for more LTE coverage news in the future.

Come comment on this article: AT&T bumping up LTE coverage in 9 regions, adding 17 new regions

Netflix users may find their Instant Watch queues a bit lighter today. Nearly 2,000 movie titles on the popular streaming video service are set to expire today.

Originally, Slate had reported that the movies set to disappear were from MGM and United Artists, and are set to move over to the new Warner Archive Instant streaming service. Warner Bros has since denied this, and a Netflix spokesperson has stated that the movies were part of a contract the company had with Epix.

Regardless of where they are going, Netflix users today will not be able to stream movies such as Adaptation, and Big Daddy.

In other Netflix news, the company is pushing forward with its original programming initiatives. The release date of the next Netflix original series has just been announced.

Orange is the New Black will premiere on July 11, with thirteen one-hour episodes being released all at once. Starring Jason Biggs and Laura Prepon, the comedy series follows a “Brooklynite” sent to women’s prison who must deal with her new eccentric inmates.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, champions of the public interest in matters related to free speech and digital privacy, has just released their latest report on which companies actively help protect your data from the government. It’s called the “Who has your back” report and this is the third year that EFF has published it.

The methodology is simple enough. The EFF looks at 18 prominent tech companies including Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Apple, and Amazon, and judges them based on 6 different categories (up from 4 last year). It then awards stars to the companies if their actions in those categories are on the side of protecting user rights.

This year, Twitter and ISP Sonic.net were the only two companies to receive full 6-star ratings from the EFF. Last year, they were the top two performers in the report, scoring a 3.5 and 4 star rating, respectively.

Here are the 6 categories that the EFF looks at for their report:

1. Does the company require a warrant for content of communications?
2. Does the company tell users about government data requests?
3. Does the company publish transparency reports?
4. Does the company publish law enforcement guidelines?
5. Does the company fight for users’ privacy rights in court?
6. Does the company fight for users’ privacy in Congress?

Verizon and Myspace received zero stars, while Apple, AT&T, and Yahoo received 1 star. On the flip side, Dropbox, Google, LinkedIn, and Spideroak got nearly perfect marks, coming in with 5 stars out of 6.

Readers of this year’s annual privacy and transparency report should be heartened, as we are, by the improvements major online service providers made over the last year. While there remains room for improvement in areas such as the policies of location service providers and cellphone providers like AT&T and Verizon, certain practices – like publishing law enforcement guidelines and regular transparency reports – are becoming standard industry practice for Internet companies.

And we are seeing a growing, powerful movement that comprises civil liberties groups as well as major online service providers to clarify outdated privacy laws so that there is no question government agents need a court-ordered warrant before accessing sensitive location data, email content, and documents stored in the cloud.

Remember: you entrust most of these companies with almost everything in your digital life – photos, personal info, location, financial info. It’s important to know exactly where each stands in terms of protecting that info against prying eyes. The EFF warns that the absence of a star doesn’t necessarily mean that the company is thwarting user rights in that category – it simply may mean that they haven’t been given the chance to defend user rights in that arena. Here’s the EFF’s full star report:

The Atlantic is launching a new line of ebooks, “The Atlantic Books,” which will include both “original long-form pieces between 10,000 and 30,000 words, and curated archival collections that span the magazine’s 155-year history and feature some of the best-loved voices in American letters.”

The Atlantic Books is the first in a number of planned paid initiatives, the company said, and “details about the next product will be announced in coming weeks.”

The Atlantic Books’ focus on nonfiction e-singles puts it in competition with companies like Byliner and The Atavist, which publish similar works. The Atlantic’s first ebook, a memoir called Denial by Jonathan Rauch, is available today for $1.99 exclusively through Amazon’s Kindle Singles store, though The Atlantic says it will “soon” also be sold by Nook, the iBookstore and Kobo.

“The launch of The Atlantic Books reflects our commitment to innovation in publishing in the service of great journalism and storytelling,” The Atlantic president M. Scott Havens said in a statement. The Atlantic senior editor Geoffrey Gagnon is overseeing the initiative.

In other evidence of The Atlantic’s focus on long-form journalism, the company recently partnered with Longreads to feature Longreads content across its sites.

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More on the subject of Japanese overseas investment.

As we said here and here, Japanese cash outflows to world markets have so far been limited to a trickle, almost all from retail mom-and-pop investors who like higher yields and are estimated to have 1500 trillion yen ($15.40 trillion) in savings. As for Japan’s huge institutional investors — the $730 billion mutual fund industry and $3.4 trillion life insurance sectors — they are sitting tight.

If some are to be believed, the hype over outflows is misguided. Morgan Stanley for one reckons Japanese insurers’ foreign bond buying may rise by just 2-3 percent in the next two years, amounting to $60-100 billion. Pension funds are even less likely to re-balance their portfolios given large cash flow needs, the bank said.

But a Reuters survey last week revealed several insurance companies are indeed considering boosting unhedged foreign bond holdings.  Insurers currently hold almost half their assets in Japanese government bonds and risk being crowded out of the JGB market as the central bank ramps up purchases.  A recent survey by Barclays also showed Japanese investors keen on overseas debt.

Barclays analyst Bill Diviney offers the following explanation as to why institutional investors haven’t ventured out so far:

From the life insurer investment plans released last week the basic takeaway was that in terms of current levels in currency and given the rally in emerging and developed bonds of late they seem to be uncomfortable with the current price levels and the sense I get is that they are waiting fro a dip in the market. So the markets have risen in anticipation of Japanese flows but the investors themselves want to wait until there is more value and better buying levels.

He adds:

Judging from what they are saying they will be shifting allocations away from JGBs. That will have implications for fixed income market. But… their main interest is in developed markets, they are cautious and not really interested in chasing high yields. 

A survey by Barclays  (see graphic above) revealed that U.S. and German debt were Japanese investors’ preferred choices while only 20 percent of respondents thought emerging market bonds would see an increase in Japanese investment. Unsurprising, given how risk-averse these investors are. (Italy and Spain get even fewer votes) But Diviney reckons  emerging bonds will benefit from Japanese  outflows indirectly, via so-called displacement flows — if Japanese cash drives down yields on Treasuries and Bunds, some other investors might be pushed to seek returns in emerging markets, he says.

A Columbia undergraduate travels deep into the bowels of Schermerhorn Hall, home of the Motivation Science Center’s underground laboratories. (We would actually prefer to have windows, but what can you do?) He comes here to fill out a few questionnaires in exchange for $5. When he is finished, he’s told that in addition to his $5, he can choose a parting gift — an attractive, logo-embossed Columbia mug, or a disposable Bic pen. He is asked to make that choice in one of these two ways:

1. Think about what you would gain by choosing the mug, and what you would gain by choosing the pen.

Or:

2. Think about what you would lose by not choosing the mug, and what you would lose by not choosing the pen.

He chooses the mug. (They pretty much all choose the mug, because the pen is deliberately lame.) And then the experimenter asks, “What do you think is the price of the mug?” Here’s where it get’s interesting.

In that packet of questionnaires our Columbia undergrad filled out was one that measured his motivational focus — whether he tends to view his goals as ideals and opportunities to advance (what researchers call “promotion focus”), or as opportunities to stay safe and keep things running smoothly (“prevention focus“). While everyone has a mix of both to some extent, most of us tend to have a dominant focus. (To find out yours, try this free online assessment).

And as it turns out, if the way you ask him to make his choice fits with his motivational focus — thinking about gains for a promotion-focused person, or thinking about avoiding losses for a prevention-focused person — he thinks the mug is worth more. About 50% more, to be precise.

You might be saying to yourself, “But what if he actually had to spend his own money to buy it? Would he really be willing to pay more? Would motivational fit have such a big effect… or any effect at all?” The researchers wondered that, too.

So they brought in more undergrads, and ran the experiment again: gave each of them $5 just for showing up, and then asked them whether they would prefer the mug or the pen by thinking either about what they would gain or lose with each. Once again, everybody preferred the mug.

Then the researcher did something different. They showed the subjects an envelope containing a fair price for the mug. The researcher explained that the subject could now buy the mug if he wished to, but only if he offered an amount that was equal to or higher than the price in the envelope. (The idea is similar to a silent auction — you make your best bid and see what happens.) If he offered an amount less than the price, he would not get the mug. If he offered an amount equal to or higher than the price in the envelope, then he would get the mug for the price that they offered. The table below shows how much of their own $5 they were willing to pay to get the mug in each condition.

So the answer is yes: Even when people are spending their own money, they perceive an object to be worth much more — this time, roughly 70% more — when they make their decision in a way that creates motivational fit. It’s an experience that creates real, honest-to-goodness cash value.

Findings like these have emerged with many other kinds of products, too, as Tory Higgins and I found while researching our book (Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing The World For Success and Influence). For instance, when consumers were allowed to evaluate bike helmets in a way that created motivational fit, they were willing to pay about 20% more for one. In another study, consumers offered to pay more than 40% more for the same reading booklight if the way they made their choice created motivational fit.

Here’s the best part: Study after study shows that consumers who choose products while experiencing motivational fit are later significantly more satisfied with their selections. So you aren’t just tricking people into paying more — by taking into account your audience’s promotion or prevention focus, you are giving them the opportunity to experience of a genuinely better product. It just all depends on how you ask.

A year after it launched a pilot program making new ebooks available to some libraries, Big 6 publisher Hachette announced Wednesday that it will make its entire catalog of over 5,000 ebooks available to libraries nationwide as of May 8.

New ebooks will be available to libraries at the same time as the print edition. For new ebooks, Hachette is charging libraries three times the price of the “primary” print book. One year after publication, the price of an ebook will drop to 1.5 times the price of the print book. Hachette defines “primary” book price as “the highest-price edition then in print. The ebooks can be checked out an unlimited number of times (with each ebook only available to one patron at a time), and the library does not have to buy a new copy after a year. The publisher says it will review its pricing policy annually.

Hachette is working with all three major library distributors: Overdrive, Baker & Taylor and 3M. Because Hachette is working with Overdrive, this means that the ebooks will be available for Kindle.

The last couple of months have brought many changes to Big 6 publishers’ ebook lending policies, with Penguin and Simon & Schuster both announcing changes to their programs. Penguin announced in March that it would begin making new ebooks available to libraries again, a year after it had pulled them, though it is still only working with a limited number of libraries in a pilot program. Simon & Schuster is making its ebooks available to New York City public libraries in a trial.Random House makes all of its ebooks available to libraries, but at prices as much as three times higher than the retail price. HarperCollins allows its ebooks to be checked out 26 times before the library has to buy a new copy. Macmillan is running a two-year trial that makes 1,200 older ebooks available to libraries.

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Ted Chamberlin is vice president, market development, cloud for Coresite.

TED CHAMBERLIN
Coresite

With the recent announcement from the Microsoft Azure camp stating “ its commitment to price match Amazon Web Services prices for commodity services like compute, storage and bandwidth, aligned with the general availability of Windows Azure infrastructure services,” the official race to zero begins in the Infrastructure as a Service market. This shot across the bow of AWS will most definitely bother AWS, but it should scare the stuffing out of the rest of the IaaS market. Particularly the providers who the traditional businesses trust a bit more for more enterprise-ish workloads should be concerned.

Providers like GoGrid, Tata, Savvis, Terremark, Rackspace Cloud and others just entering the market will face the heavier crosswinds as these behemoths engage battles. The stark reality is that hyper scale providers like Amazon use their operational acumen and scale to drive pricing down on IaaS services on a regular basis. This will create an exceedingly tougher environment for the rest of the cloud providers to compete. How is an IaaS provider to thrive, yet alone, survive?

The Power of Community

Many of these market entrants have the solution already teed up in the data centers. Many companies will choose their colocation, hosting or cloud providers based upon the current occupants in those facilities so that they can trade traffic, conduct commerce or just inhabit a robust ecosystem.

The next step in this evolution is to develop these neighbors into a fully-fledged community where users can vote/nominate who enters the community and freely conduct business in these exchanges. The community clouds truly contain elements that represent the best of both worlds in cloud adoption, scalability and exclusivity.

According to my alma mater Gartner, “Private Cloud Computing is among the highest interest areas across all cloud computing according to Gartner, with 75% of respondents in Gartner polls saying they plan to pursue a strategy in this area by 2014.” Many enterprises understand cerebrally that public cloud scale is a key enabler tor growth, but many still are uncomfortable moving critical, compliant and sensitive workloads to public.

Community clouds, although still nascent in the landscape will start to provide the benefits or interconnect and limited participation that will help companies move of those workloads to a community cloud. These communities of like-minded organizations also represent a departure from commodity, low cost, low value services. They value of the community rises as the participants -albeit the correct ones-join the community.

Operators and enablers of cloud communities also have value-based roles to play such as providing the interconnect services, advertising the services of the community as well as developing and managing of those hardware and software stacks. The U.S. government’s Fed RAMP initiatives has test driven the community cloud for government agencies and partners, and despite the less then atomic pace that the Federal government exhibits, growth is starting to show in Federal cloud initiatives.

Next up? Potentially digital media clouds, expansion of financial services low latency communities and healthcare exchanges. All of this potential commerce and transaction in these communities represent a way for differentiated, value based IaaS services that will help to slow down the race to zero so that everyone carve out their own revenue opportunity in the new world order of cloud series.

Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library.

Panda Security has announced the availability of the first public beta for its do-everything home user suite, Panda Global Protection 2014. The package includes an antivirus engine, firewall, identity protection, spam filter, parental controls, virtual keyboard, local and online backup modules, file encryption and shredding, and remote PC access.

New features this time include boot analysis of your system for better detection of even the stealthiest of malware. There will also now be protection for Mac, iOS and Android devices (the latter component isn’t available yet, but clicking “Multi-device protection” within the program will tell you more).

And this is all packaged in a very Windows 8-like interface, with colorful tiles giving an appealing front end to the suite.

What’s the program like? We found it installed easily, without requiring other security packages to be removed first. (You may still want to do so to reduce the chance of conflicts, but it’s not necessary).

The interface looks good and is generally easy to use. The Windows 8 style of interface isn’t applied consistently just yet, and occasionally you’re left to explore some fairly complex dialogs, but for the most part it works very well.

Performance, however, did prove to be an issue for us. Scans took an age, and other programs were considerably slower once Panda Global Protection 2014 was installed. This is of course exactly the kind of thing you expect from a beta, though, so we wouldn’t draw any conclusions from it just yet.

On balance, the suite has an extensive list of features, looks good and is (for the most part) easy to use. If you’re also affected by the performance problems then you won’t want to run it for long, but otherwise Panda Global Protection 2014 looks promising, and we’ll be interested to see how it progresses.

Those wacky IBM scientists are at it again.

Researchers at the IT giant’s Almaden Lab in San Jose, Calif.  worked for ten days moving 10,000  individual atoms around on a microscopic surface to build the images of a boy and his interactions. It takes some massive gear to move 10,000 tiny atoms around and IBM’s lab had just the thing, a 2-ton scanning tunnelling microscope (STM).

One goal, according IBM, is to inspire kids to study and pursue careers in science and technology.  And, the work could lead to breakthroughs in storage and other technology fields.

According to an IBM blog post on the project:

“The ability to move single atoms, one of the smallest particles of any element in the universe, is crucial to IBM’s research in the field of atomic-scale memory. In 2012, IBM scientists announced the creation of the world’s smallest magnetic memory bit, made of just 12 atoms. This breakthrough could transform computing by providing the world with devices that have access to unprecedented levels of data storage. But even nanophysicists need to have a little fun. In that spirit, the scientists moved atoms by using their scanning tunneling microscope to make … a movie, which has been verified by Guinness World Records™ as The World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film.”

Enough chit chat though, check out the film for yourself:

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