> SOUTHERN INDIANA — My wife Diane and I just returned from spending the weekend in a log cabin. We stayed at this cabin twice before, but this time we were unpleasantly surprised by the host of strange noises we heard. As soon as we entered the cabin, we immediately heard creaking in the upstairs loft that sounded like there was someone walking around. I didn’t want to scare Diane, who I’m sure was thinking exactly the
It has come to this at the Rogers Cup women’s tournament.
As the top seeds have fallen like tenpins in a bowling alley, the lesser lights have come to the fore, sometimes with rare, hardly genteel-like emotion. Thank god for any kind of excitement at this point.
Agnieszka Radwanska (world no. 12) won a hard-fought match against bright new face Andrea Petkovic – who just arrived in the world’s top 10 this week – and will advance to the semi-finals on Saturday after a 6-4, 6-3 win.
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Radwanska, banished to the lesser courts earlier in the week, was playing on centre court for the first time on Friday in her match with Petkovic. Now she’s on centre stage and in the spotlight with her precise and wily shot-making.
Two years ago, Petkovic didn’t make it through qualifiers at the Rogers Cup. last year, she lost in the first round. And yesterday, she was so close, a thumbnail or two away, from making it to the semi-finals.
So after she lost the first set, she felt the frustration rise, with her emotional Serbian heart (she is a German citizen), and thumped her athletic bag with her racquet in frustration. She took a dive at the net with it, too, and she banged her leg with her hand. her coach came out and delivered an intense monologue to her as she collected her thoughts.
With John McEnroe in the wings, waiting to play in the Legends tournament here, was there an old sniff of that memorable petulance?
“I think nowadays, you don’t see it any more,” Petkovic said afterwards. Actually, McEnroe was one of her favourite players.
“I really enjoyed his outbursts, I have to say, “ Petkovic admitted. “but he was a different kind of personality. he used it to his advantage. In my case, if I have an outburst, most of the time I cannot use it to my advantage, so this is a problem.
“but I think everybody needs to find the right way for himself. I think nowadays, the players are really much calmer than they were in the days back then. Me, personally, when I watch tennis? I like to see some emotion.”
This is not to say that Petkovic is an arrogant diva. Hardly. In a musty pit of single-minded children of the racquet, Petkovic is a breath of fresh air.
She’s candid to the nth degree. She lives with a smile. She counts having friends as “one of the most important things in life for me.” She reads Goethe, an accomplishment in itself. And she zips through Shakespeare in German (wading through it in its native English throws her off track.) She wants to establish a political party in Germany. She writes an outrageous blog, making fun of herself, and some day wants to be a journalist. (Lord help her.) on video websites around the world, Petkovic is known as Petkovazzi, a play on the word paparazzi. She’s known for her Petko dance, a jig she does after victory, although she picks her spots, not wanting to disrespect her opponents.
Petkovic made some great strides this week. on Thursday, she defeated Wimbledon champion Petra Kvitova (No. 7 in the world). She not only defeated her. She dominated her, winning 6-1, 6-2.
Radwanska also slew giants in a understated way, taking out third seed Vera Zvonareva to get to the quarter-finals.
Radwanska met Petkovic only last week in Carlsbad, Ca., and defeated her there, too, in the semi-finals but with Petkovic in the mix, it wasn’t a boring event.
Read her blog on the adventure and it’s pure Petkovic: After the first set, Petkovic said she felt drained, like she wanted to vomit all the time. “I told the umpire I wanted to go to the bathroom, because I had to throw up,” she wrote. “I think everybody heard it actually!
“At the point where I ran out, I couldn’t hold it back any more. ….I’m sure you don’t want details of the bathroom, but I felt way much better after running off the court like a maniac. I had trouble finding my intensity after that.”
Now that she’s out of the tournament, Petkovic will have some time for some Canadian beer, something she’s been pining for. but Radwanska will have to go to work to stave off Samantha Stosur, who earlier defeated Roberta Vinci in straight sets, 6-4, 6-1.
“I’ll have to be 100 per cent to beat her,” said a weary Radwanska, after dealing with the power of Petkovic.
Apple subsidiary Filemaker today announced the release of Bento 4, a significant update to the company’s personal database software for Mac OS X. With the release, Bento is now available on the Mac App Store for the first time, although boxed versions are also available.
New features in Bento 4 include support for label printing, new options for printing forms, the option to export templates with data included for pre-populated templates, location data integration, and more. Bento 4 is priced at $49 for a single license or $99 for a five-license pack. Current Bento users are eligible for a $20 rebate.
Filemaker has also released updated versions of Bento for iPhone and iPad, priced at $4.99 each. The updates bring several enhancements including voice memo support and multitasking.
Bento for iPhone and Bento for iPad have both received significant updates. You can now record voice memos into media fields on your mobile devices and tie them to your records, perfect for capturing events, logging meetings for later review, and just capturing notes without typing. Voice memos can be synched with Bento 4 for the Mac.
Bento for Mac users can make more use of their information on the Bento for iPhone and Bento for iPad. Now you can sync iCal tasks from the Mac, edit simple list data on your iPhone, and use related records to link libraries.
Other enhancements include multi-tasking and improved support for the iPhone Retina display.
The Bento iOS applications also now offer support for multiple languages for the first time, with Japanese, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch now being supported.
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IDG News Service reports that German researchers have demonstrated how a knowledgeable thief could bypass the iPhone’s passcode locking to upload a script capable of revealing entries from the device’s password keychain system, potentially giving the hacker access to sensitive passwords stored on the device.
In a video that demonstrates the attack, the researchers first jailbreak the phone using existing software tools. They then install an SSH server on the iPhone that allows software to be run on the phone.
The third step is to copy a keychain access script to the phone. The script uses system functions already in the phone to access the keychain entries and, as a final step, outputs the account details it discovers to the attacker.
The attack works because the cryptographic key on current iOS devices is based on material available within the device and is independent of the passcode, the researchers said. This means attackers with access to the phone can create the key from the phone in their possession without having to hack the encrypted and secret passcode.
According to the report, the researchers were able to obtain passwords for Gmail accounts, Microsoft Exchange accounts, voicemail access, VPN and Wi-Fi network passwords, as well as passwords for some applications.
The researchers note that gaining access to an email password makes it easy for hackers to then reset passwords for other types of accounts, while compromised passwords for corporate networks can obviously result in security issues for businesses.
The exploit obviously requires a fair amount of technical knowledge, and thus shouldn’t be an issue for the vast majority of users whose devices become lost or stolen. But the exploit could be used in targeted attacks by those specifically seeking to gain access to sensitive systems.
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In November, a German market research firm released a study indicating that outside of Apple’s iPhone, most smartphone owners had little loyalty to their smartphone. 56% of Apple users in global markets would remain loyal to their device, it said. Now that data has been reconfirmed by a second study, this one from mobile analytics firm Zokem . It shows that within the U.S. market specifically …
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iPhone User Loyalty Still Tops Android, Others
In November, a German market research firm released a study indicating that outside of Apple’s iPhone, most smartphone owners had little loyalty to their smartphone. 56% of Apple users in global markets would remain loyal to their device, it said. Now that data has been reconfirmed by a second study, this one from mobile analytics firm Zokem . It shows that within the U.S. market specifically …
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iPhone User Loyalty Still Tops Android, Others
Foss Patents reports that a joint venture company involving Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, and EMC has acquired 882 patents from Novell for a sum of $450 million. Novell is undergoing a transition as it has been acquired by software company Attachmate, and the patent sale is part of the acquisition deal.
Breaking news: Twitter user @VM_gville just pointed me to the website of the German federal antitrust authority (“Bundeskartellamt”), which discloses a merger (or more precisely, joint venture) notification filed a week ago (on 09 December 2010), according to which the four companies behind CPTN Holdings LLC — the acquirer of 882 Novell patents — are Microsoft, Apple, EMC, and Oracle. The product market in which the newly formed company plans to operate is defined as “patents”.
Three weeks ago I already commented on the recent announcement of Attachmate acquiring Novell and the sale of 882 Novell patents, in exchange for $450 million, to CPTN Holdings LLC. At the time, the full list of CPTN Holdings LLC partners was not known. The entity was described as a “consortium organized by Microsoft.”
Apple, which boasts an extensive patent portfolio of its own, has been looking to bolster its arsenal even further as several large blocks of intellectual property have come available in an increasingly litigious technology industry that has seen Apple rank as the most-sued tech company over the last several years. Apple is said to be one of a number of big players bidding to acquire Nortel patents estimated to be worth over $1 billion in total.
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Giving the iPhone a bigger screen has resulted in an iPad, but now what seems to be a group of German hackers and designers has gone one bigger, letting you turn your iPhone into a 58-inch LED screen multitouch iPhone Table, but there’s a catch: you’ll need to jailbreak and there’s no word yet on the price! No, it’s not the iPad Mega or an official iTable in light of Microsoft’s AUD $20,000 …
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Apple iNvoluntarily brought to the iPhone Table?
Intel today confirmed long-standing rumors by announcing that it will acquire the Wireless Solutions (WLS) unit of German firm Infineon for $1.4 billion. The move gives Intel a significant expansion into the market for smartphone chips as it continues to try to build interest in its own Atom platform for mobile and netbook devices.
Through this effort, Intel will pair WLS’ best-in-class cellular technology with its core strengths to enable the delivery of low-power, Intel-based platforms that combine its applications processor with an expanded portfolio of wireless options — bringing together Intel’s leadership in Wi-Fi and WiMAX with WLS’ leadership in 2G and 3G, and a combined path to accelerate 4G LTE.
The acquisition is notable for Apple, as the company has long eschewed Intel’s offerings for its mobile devices in favor of ARM-based technology. Infineon’s wireless unit has, however, supplied the baseband controller for supporting cellular connectivity in every generation of the iPhone.
While Intel and Apple have been key partners on the Mac platform since Apple began moving away from the PowerPC platform with the release of the Mac Pro in 2006, the two companies have not seen fit to work together on the mobile side of things. Intel has in the past been critical of the iPhone’s use of ARM-based processor technology, claiming that any device seeking to access the “full Internet” needs to be based on Intel’s technology.
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German site Macerkopf.de [Google translation] and Italian site iPadevice [Google translation] report that Apple’s iBookstore has begun to go live in a number of international countries. The news comes after iPad versions of those and other c…
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International iBookstores Begin to Go Live With Free Project Gutenberg Books