Each year Google becomes more and more of a greedy obnoxious a**hole of a company..  One day we are going to look back and ask ourselves how we allowed an advertising company to so completely control the internet.

Google is building a new version of the search engine that made it great. This time, however, it is a search engine exclusive to the garden of Google products. If you compete with Google in any way, you’re in its crosshairs. Your chances of ranking high enough to garner traffic are virtually nil and getting smaller.

The scariest part of this is that, if you sell something using the internet, regardless of whether or not you see yourself as a “local" business - or think you’re competing with Google - Google sees you as competition. Searching for “Camera" or “Buy a Dress Shirt" gets you a nearly identical split of screen real estate as that of “local" searches. Nearly everything leads back to a Google product except for an ever-decreasing amount of “Organic" real estate.

It’s Google’s world, and from now on, you’ll have to pay to play in it.

http://blog.tutorspr...th-of-organic-search

In conjunction with my Screenshot Captor screenshot taking tool, I frequently get asked for recommendations concerning OCR software to scan an image and recognize text.

Today, our friends over at FreewareGenius have a nice roundup of free OCR tools:

http://www.freewareg...n-of-free-ocr-tools/

See also: http://www.techsuppo...ree-ocr-software.htm

From an article today:

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), the world’s largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes.

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft (MSFT) and other software or Internet security companies have been aware that this type of early alert allowed the U.S. to exploit vulnerabilities in software sold to foreign governments, according to two U.S. officials.

http://www.bloomberg...usands-of-firms.html

Maybe start with this summary on TechDirt: http://www.techdirt....t-patches-them.shtml

Basic Info

App Name	(FREE version)
Thumbs-Up Rating
App URL	http://www.qiqqa.com/

Intro:
On 2012-11-04, I made this comment in a discussion thread Re: organize data for research

...[Reference Management software: There is good software in this category that could be seriously useful in research work. For example:

• Calibre: take a look at the review thread Calibre - e-Book (Personal Library/Document) Management - Mini-Review
  
• Qiqqa: I have been using this for a while now and should really do something about posting a review of it - the website is http://www.qiqqa.com/
  

-IainB (November 04, 2012, 03:49 PM)

- so this is the belated review of Qiqqa.

Summary description of Qiqqa:
Qiqqa contains everything you essentially need for the five stages of commercial or academic research work/projects:

• 1. Organize
• 2. Discover
• 3. Review
• 4. Collaborate
• 5. Create

Most of these projects require collecting and reading a large number of papers or "knowledge items" - sometimes thousands of documents. The sheer volume of these documents can sometimes make it difficult to work with them, sift through them, and keep things under control.
Qiqqa was designed with this task in mind, and it has these main features to help you keep those documents under control and to keep your knowledge expanding coherently:

• 1. Comprehensive PDF document management.
• 2. The ability to import documents to the Qiqqa library/database.
• 3. OCR of imaged documents, with capture of text contained in any imaged PDF documents.
• 4. Automatic collection/creation of metadata for the documents.
• 5. "Super Tag" functionality to categorise and cross-reference your document content.
• 6. Sophisticated Find/Search functionality.
• 7. Ability to export the contents of your Qiqqa library/database.
• 8. Knowledge analysis/discovery.
• 9. Research web browser.
• 10. Brainstorming (Mindmaps).
• 11. Knowledge-linking.

DC Member IanB writes:

There is a really interesting post on the history behind Mathematica, on Stephen Wolfram's blog: There Was a Time before Mathematica …

Well...it's gotta start somewhere...and this is how they chose to do it.



Microsoft has released a short official video preview of Windows 8.1 that neatly sidesteps all the things real users want to know about, like: how is the revived Start button gonna work...and how well does it work with a mouse in a non-touchscreen environment...and with a large or dual monitor setup.

But you get none of that. Just Jensen Harris (who looks like Mini-Me's bigger sibling) smiling like a dork and talking about things like "cool" and being "excited" about cosmetic features and eye candy while demoing it on a (surprise! surprise!) Surface tablet.

I had hopes. But it looks like Microsoft still isn't quite ready to directly address the concerns and wishes of a very large part of their customer base. So instead we get more Metro, puff features, plus a low key pitch for Skydrive, and the Surface.

Guess we're just gonna have to wait until it's released before we have any real answers.