Chrome OS: More questions than answers?
Hearing the news of Google’s Chrome OS at the end of last week left me with an uneasy feeling about the future of operating systems and computer use. The general idea behind Chrome OS is that the operating system as you see it will be nothing more than a web browser with a few things plugged into it, and a massively slimmed down operating system which will load in a fraction of the average time taken with existing products. But even as a man who looks towards the next generation, this d

Let's get rid of usernames and passwords for good
Usernames and passwords annoy me. Expert advice says to have a different username and password for various services, but the amount of subscriptions, email accounts, social networks and other sites we subscribe to can run into the dozens, if not hundreds. Password managers help, and single sign-on solutions for an array of sites are useful, and devices like smart cards and biometric devices save us remembering a whole array of combinations. But what if you’re away from your primary computer? You still need to remember all of the sequences and mishmashes of letters and numbers whether you like it or not.

Office 2010 Beta 2: More than just a bunch of pretty icons
Office 2010 is more than just a bunch of pretty icons. I’ve only been playing with the Beta 2 of Office 2010 for a few hours now, but considering that my academic life pretty much takes absolute precedence over anything else, using Office for a short time feels (and practically is) like a lifetime already. Outlook is without doubt the killer application. I’ve only recently dived

The weirdest Easter egg ever seen on Facebook
I am truly stunned and baffled. How many times do you get emails or messages which say something along the lines of, “if you press Alt+F4 then you get a secret menu”, or similar? This was exactly the case when I saw a friend’s status message on Facebook. I’m still struggling to cope with this as the sheer surprise of it actually working has taken my breath away. But what’s more peculiar is to why it is even there in the first place. Here’s what you do. Go to a

How could Twitter help in a terrorist attack?
On 7th July 2005, fifty two people were killed when four suicide bombers detonated home made explosives on the London Underground. During this time, there was panic, confusion, miscommunication and a number of issues relating to where to go and what was going on. Even law enforcement suffered making the situation even more fragile. With experience of hindsight, with a number of events which social networking from ordinary members of the public (”citizen journalism”) from the terrori