Downloads | San Diego-Tech

July 21, 2010
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Amazon.com says it’s selling 80% more downloaded books than hardcovers

There’s more evidence that digital books are upending the publishing industry.

Internet retailer Amazon.com Inc. says it is now selling 80% more downloaded books than hardbacks. Amazon’s download format is for its Kindle electronic reader as well as other devices.

“The Kindle format has now overtaken the hardcover format,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, in a statement.”Astonishing when considering that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years and Kindle books for 33 months.”

Paperback books, which far outsell hardbacks, were not included in the announcement. Also, Amazon did not disclose sales numbers for the categories.

But it was clear that digital books were on the rise. A survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers and Wilkofsky Gruen Associates Inc. has shown that although revenue from retail sales of printed books has been stagnant for several years, electronic books were forecast to surge to $1.6 billion in sales in 2010 from $1 billion last year.

Amazon said that for its full second quarter, 143 electronic books were purchased on the site for every 100 hardcover books sold.

May 4, 2010
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Internet Explorer Finally Fades Away!

Tags : Firefox Internet Explorer

Category : Computer Security , Downloads , Internet

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser market share has dipped to a historic all-time-low in April, at under 60 percent, according the latest NetApplications statistics. Internet Explorer’s losses are at the expense of Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome browser which continue to grow more popular.

For the first time since Internet Explorer 4 won over Netscape over 10 years ago, Microsoft’s browser has dropped in usage to 59.95 per cent market share in April this year. Internet Explorer had an 80 percent market share less than two years ago.

NetApplications browser market share statistics for April 2010.

According to the NetApplications statistics, Mozilla’s Firefox browser now has nearly 25 percent market share, and has been stationery for the last two months at around a quarter of the market. Firefox is still the largest threat to Internet Explorer‘s dominance.

Lower down in the NetApplication rankings was Google’s Chrome (6.7 percent), leading the WebKit-powered browsers, ahead of Apple’s Safari (4.7 percent). Chrome’s surge in use is impressive, considering it had zero percent share prior to 2009.

Opera, which has been recently in the news with their new Opera Mini browser for iPhone, commands only 2.3 percent of the market in the NetApplications statistics.

NetApplciation’s numbers are not too far off from StatCounter data either, which says that Internet Explorer has 56.5 percent of the market share, followed by Firefox with 31.3 per cent, then by Chrome and Safari with 5.3 and 3.6 percent respectively. StatCounter measures Opera at 2.2 percent.

Nielsen data on the other hand, via a BBC report, suggest that Internet Explorer has not lost much ground against its fellow rival browsers, and still commands 70 per cent of the market, while Mozilla has only 18 percent.

April 22, 2010
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How to fix your McAfee-crippled computer

Tags : McAfee

Category : Computer Repair , Computer Security , Downloads , Internet , San Diego Computer Repair

McAfee pushed out a malformed security patch early on Wednesday that wound up crippling computers running Windows XP, but there is a fix available. Users should note that it’s labor-intensive and must be applied manually to each computer. If you’re running Windows Vista or Windows 7, your computer shouldn’t be affected by the bad update.

As of 3 p.m. PDT, McAfee had yet to link on its front door to a fix for a false positive update with disastrous consequences that went out Wednesday morning.

If your computer is shutting down automatically, you must address that before you can fix anything else.

Step 1: Open a command prompt: Start menu, Run, then type cmd and hit Enter

Step 2: Type shutdown -a, which will prevent the shutdown from occurringMcAfee has revealed two fixes for the problem. Each one requires multiple steps, and can be confusing. If you’re not comfortable with advanced computer fixes, you should get help with this.For the first fix, go to the McAfee interface through the Start menu, and disable Access Protection and On-Access Scanner.

Step 1: Click Start, Programs, McAfee, and then VirusScan Console

Step 2: Right-click “Access Protection”

Step 3: Select “Disable”If you have Internet access, download the EXTRA.ZIP file provided by McAfee and unzip the EXTRA.DAT within. (Note that Nai.com is a safe site maintained by McAfee, for those who were wondering.) Once EXTRA.DAT has been extracted:

Step 1: Click Start, Run, then type services.msc and click “OK”

Step 2: Right-click the McAfee McShield service and select “Stop”

Step 3: Copy EXTRA.DAT to “Program FilesCommon FilesMcAfeeEngine”

Step 4: Then restart the McAfee McShield service by right-clicking on it and choosing “Start” from the context menu

Step 5: Re-enable access protection by going back to the VirusScan Console

Step 6: Right-click “Access Protection”

Step 7: Select “Enable”

Step 8: In the VirusScan Console, go to the Quarantine Manager Policy

Step 9: Click the Manager tab

Step 10: Right-click on each file in the Quarantine and choose “Restore”There is, of course, one massive hang-up with this McAfee-recommended solution: More likely than not, you don’t have Internet access on your McAfee-borked computer. In fact, it’s highly unlikely that you have access to much of anything, since deleting SVCHOST.EXE prevents key Windows 32-bit sub-system processes from functioning at all. To get the EXTRA.DAT on your computer, you’ll probably have to download it on an unaffected computer, then copy it to either a USB drive or a CD-ROM and use the command prompt to copy it over to your C: drive.The second workaround requires that you apply the EXTRA.DAT fix as detailed above before beginning and that you have access to a second, unaffected Windows XP computer. On that computer, go to C:WINDOWSsystem32 and copy SVCHOST.EXE to a network location or a removable media device such as a USB stick. Then copy the SVCHOST.EXE from the unaffected computer to the affected computer, and restart the McAfee-afflicted computer. There are details on applying the EXTRA.DAT via ePolicy Orchestrator at McAfee’s fix on Nai.com.Severe problems caused by buggy or false positive security updates are rare, but not unheard of. Recent instances include an update from Avast that marked hundreds of legitimate files as threats in December 2009, Computer Associates flagging a Windows system file as a virus in July 2009, and AVG marking ZoneAlarm as malware in October 2008.

McAfee did not immediately responded to a request for comment.

Updated at 5 p.m. PDT with additional information.

McAfee Executive Vice President of Technical Support and Customer Service Brian MacPherson has written a blog post and a follow-up commenting on the situation, although neither addresses how the bad update made it past quality-control testing in the first place.

Category Archives: Downloads

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Amazon.com says it’s selling 80% more downloaded books than hardcovers

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Internet Explorer Finally Fades Away!

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How to fix your McAfee-crippled computer

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