Free PDF reader boasts advanced features

There are plenty of free PDF readers available for download including the ubiquitous Adobe Reader from the company that created PDFs in 1993. But Nitro PDF, which publishes the $99.99 Nitro Professional PDF creation tool, is now offering afree PDF reader. Features include include the ability to write comments that can be read by any other PDF reader. Users can also enter text in a static PDF document and insert a graphic, such as a scanned signature. The reader can also be used to create PDFs, though it lacks many of the advanced features available in the professional version.

To explain how the products works, I spoke with the company's chief product officer, Lonn Lorenz.

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Kylo, the Web browser for your TV, gets geeky

Did you hear? Having the Internet on your TV is a big thing again.

Google is just now getting into the game, but companies like Hillcrest Labs and its Kylo browser have been around for years. On Wednesday Hillcrest is putting out an update to its TV-friendly browser, which brings a handful of new goodies like user agent spoofing and integration with Windows Media Center.

Between the two major features, the user agent string tweaker is infinitely more geeky, but can go a long ways towards making some sites simpler to navigate from your couch. In short, it lets you set which sites you want to use a certain user agent for (like the Wii, iPad, or iPhone), so that each time you visit them the browser will trick it into thinking you're accessing the site from one of those devices. This is particularly useful if you're privy to one of YouTube's many custom variants, like for the Wii or PlayStation 3.

You can now have Kylo trick sites into thinking you're using a particular browser, which can be useful in some places that offer a more couch-friendly version.

(Credit: Screenshot by Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

As for the Windows Media Center plug-in, it simply adds a launcher for Kylo within WMC that lets you launch it from within the app, then come back to Media Center when done. This may seem like a small tweak, but it makes it markedly simpler to jump back and forth between watching live TV (if you have a TV tuner) or recorded/stored content, and doing some casual browsing.

Other additions include a way to pick what the default page zoom is when opening any Web page, a toggle to have Kylo's UI hide itself after loading a page, and support for printing Web pages to a networked printer.

Hillcrest Labs is definitely in a unique position until the release of Google TV later this year. While the company makes its Kylo browser for Web browsing on computers hooked up to TV sets, it also makes a pointing peripheral called The Loop, and licenses its Freespace pointing technology to third-parties. Google, on the other hand, plans to bring its software outside of computers and into TV sets and set top boxes. The two companies are unlikely to co-exist on the browser front, however Hillcrest could do well licensing its pointer tech to remote makers.

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Yahoo buys mobile social network provider Koprol

Though Yahoo may have wanted to buy Foursquare, the company has found another way to hook into the world of location-based social networking.

Yahoo announced Tuesday that it has bought Koprol, a social network for mobile users. Based in Jakarta, Indonesia, Koprol lets people make friends, share photos, and find popular nearby locations all on the go. The news comes a day after Yahoo and Nokia extended their 5-year-old partnership with an eye toward the rising interest in geo-location offerings, pledging to bring Nokia's Navteq mapping service to Yahoo, and Yahoo's e-mail and instant-messaging technology to Nokia's Ovi service.

(Credit: Koprol)

Accessing Koprol from your mobile device, you can see what your friends are doing and where they're hanging out. You can find neighborhood restaurants, stores, and other businesses and then rate your favorites or not-so-favorites. You can also start discussions and then invite others to join in on the conversation. Based on all this feedback, Koprol can develop a pretty comprehensive database of local activities and resources. And that's what attracted Koprol's new owner.

Yahoo said it plans to use Koprol's community-based information to make its own home page and other sites and services more relevant to local and mobile users. Though Koprol is currently specific to Indonesia, Yahoo said it plans to expand the service to other parts of the world.

"Users are increasingly relying on mobile devices to communicate and access the Internet and they are looking for seamless integration between those devices and PCs. This is especially true in many emerging markets where we are introducing the Yahoo brand to many new-to-Net users," said Rose Tsou, senior vice president, Asia Region at Yahoo.

Yahoo said it will enhance Koprol's service, including a new application for the BlackBerry, and expects to unveil apps for other mobile devices down the road. On its end, the Koprol team said it will continue business as usual but will likely roll out new features faster than expected with Yahoo's support and backing. Beyond more mobile apps, a couple of the new developments in store include an Indonesian language version and accounts for business users.

Eyeing the latest trend of location-based social networks for mobile users, Yahoo's CEO Carol Bartz has been itching to buy a business to take advantage of that market. The company was angling to pick up Foursquare, but that deal seems stuck in neutral at this point.

The price tag and other financial details of the Koprol purchase were not disclosed.

Below, Yahoo talks with Koprol's founders about the service:

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Intel to lay out supercomputing chip plans

Intel on Tuesday provided more color to its plans for supercomputing chips that would eventually compete with offerings from Nvidia. Intel said it will provide further details next week at a supercomputing conference.

In the wake of Intel's cancelation of the "Larrabee" graphics chip projectin December of last year, Intel is now focusing on an analogous project targeted at supercomputers, a market that is generally referred to as high-performance computing or HPC.

"We are...executing on a business opportunity derived from the Larrabee program and Intel research in many-core chips," Bill Kircos, an Intel spokesman said Tuesday, writing in a blog posted on Intel's Web site.

"This server product line expansion is optimized for...segments such as high-performance computing," he wrote. Intel Vice President Kirk Skaugen will provide further details next week at ISC 2010 in Germany.

Kircos reiterated that Intel has no plans to bring out a discrete graphics chip like the Larrabee chip for gaming PCs. "We will not bring a discrete graphics product to market, at least in the short-term," he wrote.

But the prospect of a many-core chip from Intel is intriguing, as this is a market graphics chip supplier Nvidia is targeting in a big way with its Tesla products.

In December of last year, Intel said it had reached a "milestone" with an experimental 48-core chip. "It has 48 cores hooked together in a network that mimics cloud computing on a chip level, and supports highly parallel 'scale-out' programming models," Intel said in December.

The chipmaker said at that time that it would build "100 or more experimental chips for use by dozens of industrial and academic research collaborators around the world." The goal is to develop new software applications and programming models for future many-core processors, the company said.

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Magellan's 2010 GPS lineup is a lifetime traffic free-for-all

The top of the line RoadMate 3065 Commuter features a few unique features that ease your daily commute.

(Credit: Magellan)

Magellan gets in on the free lifetime traffic trend with its new 2010 line of GPS navigators. All eight of its new devices feature free traffic service, multidestination routing, and text-to-speech. Magellan has also included a few unique features across the line, such as its OneTouch menu shortcut, a parking lot finder that automatically finds and presents nearby parking lots when you reach the end of a trip, and a find-your-car feature that stores your vehicle's location when you disconnect the RoadMate and provides you with walking directions back to your car if you forget where you parked it.

The basic RoadMate 2035 has a 4.3-inch screen and comes packed with all of the aforementioned features and map coverage of the contiguous United States and Puerto Rico.

Users who want to explore Canada can step up to the RoadMate 2036, which adds Canadian map coverage, built-in AAA Tourbook and Roadside Assistance, and Highway Lane Assist--which displays a graphic representation of highway interchanges with information about what lanes are valid for the current route. At the top of the Roadmate 2000 Series is the 2045 which adds a microSD expansion slot--which is an odd feature to base an entire model differentiation upon.

Stepping up to the RoadMate 3000 Series nets you all of the features of the 2000 Series, but bumps the screen size to 4.7 inches. The RoadMate 3045 has preinstalled maps of the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico, while the RoadMate 3045-LM is the only unit in the line that gives you free quarterly lifetime updates to those maps. The RoadMate 3055 adds Bluetooth hands-free calling and voice dialing for improved safety. For users who need a bit more screen real estate, the RoadMate 5045 has the same feature set as the 3045, but with a larger 5-inch screen.

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Google declares Chrome stable for Mac, Linux

Just shy of a year after releasing the first rough developer's build of its Chrome browser for the Mac, Google announced stable versions of Chrome for Mac and Linux, and upgraded the stable release of the browser to version 5. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, Chrome v5.0.375.55 includes support for extensions and themes, improved bookmark management and synchronization, browser preferences syncing, and the most recent stable updates to Chrome's trailblazing JavaScript engine, V8.

Chrome's geolocation feature asks whether you want to permit a Web site to know your location.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The browser also offers several HTML5-based features, including geolocation APIs, App Cache, Web sockets, and attachment drag-and-drop in Gmail. Although Adobe's Flash player was integrated into the development versions of Chrome 5, it has been touch-and-go in the beta versions and has not yet made it to the stable release of Chrome 5. The developer's version is now on version 6.

Unlike previous stable versions of the browser, this is the first one that feels like it can stand on equal footing with Firefox. Although there are some anecdotal complaints about Chrome rendering Web pages improperly, these are the vast exception to the rule. The extension gallery has also now been around long enough to give it some depth, and offers more than 4,500 ways to tweak your browser experience. As with Firefox, overloading extensions will decrease browser stability in general.

In JavaScript-only benchmark tests from SunSpider, Chrome 5 performed about the same on a Mac as on a PC. On a Windows 7 x64 running on an Intel Core 2 Duo T6570 at 2.10 GHz, with 6GB of RAM, Chrome took an average of 413.13 milliseconds over three runs to complete the test. On a Mac running OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on an Intel Core 2 Duo at 1.83 GHz, with 1GB RAM, the browser averaged 521.67 over three runs. Since Chrome landed on the browser scene in September 2008, its speed at page rendering has been its biggest selling point. It's now arguable that Chrome is the fastest browser out there, with increasingly tough competition from Opera, and Firefox's nightly builds on the horizon, but there's no doubt that it continues to be the driving force in accelerating browser page-load times.

The Mac version will only work on Intel-based Macs running OS X 10.5 Leopard or later. Somewhat annoyingly, Google will automatically upgrade Mac beta users to the stable version. Since there's no Chrome Channel Changer for Mac, you'll have to download the beta installer again to use that version. However, Mac users do finally get a full-screen mode, which had been previously unavailable in the beta.

There were also multiple security fixes introduced in Chrome 5, including two high-level repairs. One corrected possible URL bar spoofing from unload event handlers, and the other addressed incorrect JavaScript execution in extensions.

For users who've been playing around with the dev and beta versions of Chrome, these changes aren't new. The developer's channel was even elevated to version 6 last week, although not much was new in it. But with Chrome finally on stable footing that allows it to compete on all three major platforms, users shouldn't be surprised to see heightened efforts from Google to expand Chrome's user base.

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Rumored Match for WWE Fatal 4 Way

It is being heavily rumored that The Hart Dynasty will face the team of Jimmy and Jules Uso at the WWE Fatal 4 Way pay-per-view event. There is no word on if this will be a title match or not.

As we reported during Monday Night RAW last night, the Uso brothers, whose real names are Jonathan Fatu and Joseph Fatu (the sons of former WWE star Rikishi), made their debuts last night along with Sarona Reiher (Tamina from Florida Championship Wrestling), attacking The Hart Dynasty following their match against William Regal andVladimir Kozlov.
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SDO Is the Best Solar Telescope Ever

Officials at the American space agency said recently that their newly-launched Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) was one of the most remarkable pieces of equipment ever deployed to study the Sun. Speaking at the 216th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS 2010), held in Miami, Florida, experts with the mission explained that we are currently getting a new understanding of how the star works at various wavelengths, and that it's all due to this instrument. The SDO was launched on February 11, 2010, and has only recently finished undergoing its testing and commissioning phases. 

According to speakers at the conference, information collected by the SDO has thus far been able to provide more clues into how small-scale events, taking place on or below the surface of our star, are capable of influencing our planet to a great degree. Some solar phenomena, for instance, can easily disrupt communications on Earth, destroy power grids, fry satellites in orbit, and endanger the lives of astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS). The Sun's inner workings are already beginning to be revealed, thanks to the instruments that make up SDO's arsenal. “The Sun is a major part of our everyday lives. The biggest thing about SDO is that it's enabling the prediction of space weather,” explained SDO project scientist Dean Pesnell, who is based at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Even small events restructure large regions of the solar surface. It's been possible to recognize the size of these regions because of the combination of spatial, temporal and area coverage provided by [the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly instrument,” adds the SDO AIA principal investigator, Alan Title. He works at the Palo Alto, California-based Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center. “Although we knew that these small-scale emergences affected regions locally – at maybe five or 10 times their diameter – we had not known that there was the potential for much larger-scale restructuring to occur,” Title added. “Until we understand how these connections work and how fast they are, we won't really understand what really kicks off solar flares and coronal mass ejections, For the first time, we'll be able to see these connections and understand the physics that is involved with this restructuring and the energy that is involved,” he concluded. AIA is currently snapping about 70,000 images each day, Spacereports.

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Android-Based Orange Boston Arrives

Wireless carrier Orange is set to bring to the market a new series of device that will offer a wider range of its customers the possibility to try out a smartphone. To be more precise, the company is working on the delivery of Android-based mobile phones that target the mid level of the market, and Orange Boston is one of them. The handset was already spotted into the wild before, and was recently launched on the market in Spain, with plans to bring it to the UK as soon as next month. 


Mobile phone users in Spain can now take advantage of what Orange Boston has to offer to them while choosing to purchase the device with or without a monthly tariff. On contract, the black Orange Boston is available on the carrier's website with price tags raging from 59€ to 79€. However, a recent article on EuroDroid suggests that Orange would plan on having the device priced at £100 (or €120) in most European markets where it will release Boston.

One thing that is certain is that this  Andorid-based handset comes with quite appealing specs, considering the market segment it is aimed at. A 3.2-inch touchscreen display is included in the package, along with a 5-megapixel photo snapper, HSDPA and HSUPA connectivity, microSD memory card slot with a 2GB card included, 3.5 mm headphone jack, Wi-Fi, GPS, and more. As stated above, Boston's launch is said to be part of the carrier's attempt to bring the smartphone segment to more users.

“We have seen a dramatic growth in smartphones. In 2009, 15% of all devices were smartphones and this will double in 2010 to one third of devices. We expect this figure to grow to 50% by 2013,” Patrick Remy, Orange devices chief, told Mobile. “We worked on defining segments and matching the devices with the right services and tariffs in 2009 and we were happy with the results. […] One of the key elements for success is we have not compromised on the quality. We are working on a handset for the UK – this will launch in summer.”

It seems that the wireless carrier plans on having up to half of its portfolio comprised only from smartphones by 2013, and that it aims at offering a wide range of affordable devices to drive the growth in this category. At the moment,  the carrier's lineup includes 15 percent smartphones. As for the affordable devices to be launched, they will sport the Orange branding in the beginning, Patrick Remy added.
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Download Google Chrome 5.0.375.55 Stable – Fastest Chrome Yet

Google has released the fastest iteration of its open source browser yet to the general public. The final version of Google Chrome 5.0.375.55 is now available for download for users of Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The Mountain View-based search giant pushed Chrome 5.0 to Beta at the start of this month, revealing that it outperformed all previous releases of the open source browser. In less than a month since the introduction of the Beta development milestone, Google Chrome 5.0’s evolution has produced the first Stable Build, a release that is ready for the general public to install and use immediately. 

The Beta of Chrome 5.0 was 213% faster compared with the first ever Beta of the browser, according to the scores in the V8 benchmark Suite. At the same time, JavaScript performance had jumped 305% in Chrome 5.0 Beta over the first testing milestone of Chrome in the SunSpider benchmark, and sank well under 500 milliseconds. 
Chrome 5.0.375.55 marks an important milestone for Google’s open source browser, in the sense that this is the first Stable release synchronized across all supported platforms. The promise from Google is that existing users of Chrome on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux will be offered automatic upgrades to the latest Stable release soon.

“Today’s stable release also comes with a host of new features. You’ll be able to synchronize not only bookmarks across multiple computers, but also browser preferences -- including themes, homepage and startup settings, web content settings, preferred languages, and even page zoom settings. Meanwhile, for avid extensions users, you can enable each extension to work in incognito mode through the extensions manager,”  Brian Rakowski, Google Chrome product manager, revealed.

Google has also been hard at work testing deep integration between Chrome and Adobe Flash. However, for the time being, Flash did not make it into the Stable version of the search giant’s open source browser. Rakowski revealed that Adobe Flash Player integration into Chrome 5.0 would be enabled by default soon, as Adobe would produce the full release of Flash Player (version 10.1).

“Our stable release also incorporates HTML5 features such as Geolocation APIs, App Cache, web sockets, and file drag-and-drop. For a taste of HTML5’s powerful features, try browsing through websites developed in HTML5 such as scribd.com, dragging and dropping attachments in Gmail, or by enabling the geolocation functionality in Google Maps. We’ve also given Chrome’s bookmark manager a facelift with HTML5,” Rakowski added.
Google Chrome 5.0.375.55 Stable is available for download here. 

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"Lost" Finale Breaks BitTorrent Download Record

Los Angeles - The series finale of Disney/ABC's (NYSE: DIS) "Lost" has broken the single-day download record on file-sharing network BitTorrent, racking up close to 1 million downloads in less than a day, TorrentFreak reported. At peak times, more than 100,000 people were sharing a single torrent; the finale is expected to hit four or five million downloads by week's end.

TorrentFreak notes that "Lost" was the second most-pirated TV show on BitTorrent last year, behind "Heroes," but still saw an average of 1.5 million downloads per episode. 

The producers of the show attempted to curb interest in such downloads overseas, where U.S. TV shows typically air months later, by broadcasting the finale in 59 countries simultaneously.

However, TorrentFreak noted, 15% of all requests for the finale download are coming from Australia -- where the finale is not set to air until tomorrow.
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