Introduction:

Do you consider yourself an audiophile? Do you just so happen to have $200 laying around and can’t stand it? If you answered ‘yes’ to either of those questions, stop whatever you’re doing and go grab Monster Cable‘s new Gratitude headphones right now; don’t worry, I’ll wait. Needless to say, I’m a bit of a fan of these headphones, which can be described as simple audio bliss.

Styling:

Just in case it isn’t immediately obvious from the pictures, the Gratitude headphones are simply stunning to behold. The rose gold finish pops without being overly gaudy, and while wearing them around I had several people ask what brand they were, etc. I also very much appreciate how tastefully the Monster/Gratitude logos are placed on the headphones themselves; they are prominent and easily read, but not pasted all over the product.

Strangely,

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One of the top five biggest business issues IT organisations wrestle with is containing application portfolio to manageable sizes.

Many fail to take a hard look at applications ready for retirement, resulting in IT infrastructure costs needed to support applications spiralling out of control.

Here are tips on cleaning up applications portfolios:

The first step before hitting your application portfolio is setting a goal and knowing your objective. Almost every employee, process and transaction depends on an complex business application environment growing organically or via M&A over the past few decades without an overarching strategy. Over time leading to sky-rocketing maintenance costs there is little room left for innovation and growth initiatives. Staying involved with help you remain competitive.

Organisations often spend 70% of their budget on “keeping the lights on”, maintaining rogue and redundant applications.

Listing everything in your wardrobe helps determine what you’ve got and how it should be organised. The same applies to applications. An accurate inventory of your applications portfolio helps define your business and technical architecture. Pivot

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Recently Google updated the Gmail for iOS app to add Scribbles for quick pictures, and now Google has brought Scribbles for Gmail to the mobile website for Gmail.

Right now you can go to mail.google.com from any Android or iOS device as well as the PlayBook to play around with Scribbles. It’s just a simple drawing tool that lets users create quick pictures to send to their friends, but it can be fun. It means you’re able to send anything you want as long as you sketch it out. Google is looking for your best pictures from Scribbles for Gmail, and you can send it to them, so long as you don’t mind the fact that Google could upload, share, or redistribute your pictures.

Unfortunately this can’t be used on the desktop version of Gmail, but you presumably would have other sketching apps available on your computer that would be a bit easier to use.

Search engines aren’t just for finding Web content, they can also be valuable tools for security research.

At Black Hat 2010, researchers from Stach and Liu released Google and Bing tools called GoogleDiggity and BingDiggity. Those tools enable researchers to leverage those search engines to find security vulnerabilities in websites and applications. For Black Hat 2011, the researchers are back and this time they’re expanding their tools providing new capabilities to find and indentify security risk with the help of search engines.

“This year we’re adding a whole host of tools including a Windows desktop application as well as an iPhone app,” Stach and Liu security researcher Francis Brown said.

Brown explained that the new applications will enable users to plug in the website they want to monitor for hack alerts. The applications will then provide pop-up alerts when something happens in a security feed.

“So now it’s easier than ever to protect yourself against some of these risk exposures,” Brown said.

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Rep. Paul Ryan, one of the most influential members of the House of Representatives, appears to have bowed to a campaign started at Reddit.com opposing the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act.

Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican who was talked about last summer as a potential GOP presidential candidate and who delivered his party’s response to President Obama’s last State of the Union address, said today that he would vote against SOPA on the House floor.

Support for and opposition to SOPA and its Senate counterpart, Protect IP, doesn’t follow traditional party lines. The conservative Heritage Foundation has joined the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation in expressing concerns about granting government the power to deliver an Internet death penalty to allegedly piratical Web sites.

Today’s statement from Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget committee who toured SOPA-hating Silicon Valley in September, says:

The Internet is one of the most magnificent expressions of freedom and free enterprise in history. It should stay that way. While H.R.

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The Amazon Kindle is an e-book reader developed by Amazon.com. The device allows the users to shop for, download, browse, and read e-books, newspapers, magazines, blogs, and other digital media via wireless connectivity on their small tidy handheld, lightweight Kindle. This Kindle is now in the fourth generation of its kind. The Kindle does not use an LCD screen like tablet devices, instead it uses an E Ink electronic paper display, which renders 16 shades of gray simulating realistic reading paper while only using the smallest amount of power consumption.

Link: http://www.hardwarelook.com/reviews/amazon-kindle-wi-fi-6_130_1.html

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