Windows 8.1 released

Wait a few days, sure all is well with the upgrade and then go for it.  There are a lot of enhancements and improvements in this major release for Windows 8.

Windows 8.1 is finally here!

The highly anticipated update brings much-needed tweaks and improvements across the board to the critically acclaimed OS.

by Eddie Cho

October 17, 2013 11:22 AM PDT

 

On Thursday, the long-awaited update for Windows 8 was finally released into the wild. Windows 8.1 brings a slew of new features, upgrades, and overall improvements to the operating system and every app that comes with it.

If you've been using the Preview version of 8.1, many of these features should already seem familiar: swiping up from the base brings up the All Apps drawer, desktop backgrounds can move in parallax effect, and of course, the obligatory "Start" button is back (though it's just a visual icon for the home screen).

Read on for the entire article from CNET.

New shingled drives from Seagate, SMR

Very interesting new shingled HDD from Seagate.  First to release this new technology for hard drives.

Take a look at more details from the Seagate site.

Another search engine, possibly will be better than Google?

Interesting, we'll see if Blippex takes off.

From article: http://qz.com/129879/this-is-the-first-interesting-search-engine-since-google

It’s hard to build a really new search engine. Microsoft has spent enormous resources trying to convince people that Bing’s search results are just as good as Google’s. Bing has won market share, but not at Google’s expense. Other Google alternatives like DuckDuckGo are growing rapidly because they pledge to protect people’s privacy.

But the problem for most competitors to Google is that they try to imitate Google. ”We thought it strange that to compete, you had to have the same search results as them,” says Max Kossatz. “I think that’s why there’s been no innovation in search in over 10 years.”

When Kossatz and his co-founder Gerald Baeck, two Austrians living in Berlin, started building their new search engine, Blippex, their first tagline for it was something like “The Wikipedia of Search.” They ditched that for copyright reasons, but it sums up their approach nicely: Blippex is built by its own users. And this makes its search results radically—and perhaps interestingly—different.