recovery

By now I'm pretty certain that most of you are aware of the potential ecological and economical benefits of driving an electric or hybrid car that isn't reliant solely on fossil fuels. Not surprisingly, the U.S. government is getting behind the cause as well, influenced in part by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). The ARRA is the official term for the economic stimulus package passed by Congress in early 2009 to help create jobs and promote investment in American enterprises during the current recession. And when it comes to the conception and push … Read more

If you find yourself in a situation where you have lost very important files that you do not have backed up, they should still be present on the drive itself and may only be removed from the drive's index. This is useful because it means the files are still present and can be recovered; however, before you can start the recovery process there are some data safety considerations to keep in mind.… Read more

What's worse than a lost or stolen iPhone? Uh, hello? Nothing! That's why Apple invented Find My iPhone--and charges $99 per year for it as part of the MobileMe service.

If you're not willing to spend that much but want some kind of insurance against an iPhone that goes missing, check out Orbicule's Undercover.

This $4.99 app covertly transmits your phone's location and IP information to your browser-based Undercover account (free), thus allowing you to bust in on the thief and, guns blazing, take back your precious.

By which I mean, of course, … Read more

Spending on Internet advertising declined in the United States and worldwide for the second quarter of 2009, and a recovery may still be a ways off.

U.S. spending dropped 7 percent, to $6.2 billion from $6.6 billion, and worldwide spending was off 5 percent, to $13.9 billion from $14.7 billion, compared with the year-ago quarter, according to data released Wednesday by market analyst IDC.

It was the second decline in as many quarters. For the first three months of 2009, Internet advertising revenue in the U.S. was $5.5 billion, down a notable 5 percent … Read more

The mobile handset market is set for recovery after the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, according to Nokia, the world's largest maker of cell phones.

The cell phone market has been hit particularly hard by the worldwide economic slowdown. And companies such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson have taken a beating.

The second quarter of 2009 was particularly hard for Nokia. The company's earnings were ugly with a 25 percent drop in revenue, a 15 percent drop in handset shipments, and a more than 70 percent decline in operating profits, compared to the same quarter in … Read more

File recovery has never been easier thanks to Pandora Recovery. The program's wizard-like approach to finding and retrieving lost files will appeal to all users.

The user interface is about as straightforward as it gets. Clean and simple menu and command buttons run across the top of the paneled window, while a tree-menu containing hard-disk folders to browse resides in a sidebar. But what stood out the most was the program's wizard, which walked us through the process of locating long-lost files. It first prompts you to check your Recycle Bin, which sounds obvious, but is a necessary … Read more

Lifestream Backup is a new service that backs up your data from a handful of popular online services including Flickr, Twitter, BaseCamp, Google Docs, and WordPress. You just provide it with your log-in credentials (or give it permission through authentication), and it quietly makes a daily or weekly backup of all your data from each site. It can then be viewed and downloaded if one of those places suffers an outage or data loss.

For $30 a year you get 20GB of storage, which is shared across all of the different services and hosted on Amazon's S3. If you … Read more

No doubt about it, Apple's just-announced Find My iPhone app is pretty cool. If your precious goes missing, you can remotely transmit a "Help, help, I'm lost!" message in the hopes that whoever found it will return it.

If that doesn't pan out, you can send a Mission Impossible-style self-destruct command that'll wipe the iPhone's memory, thus protecting any sensitive data from falling into the wrong hands.

Unfortunately, the price of this nifty recovery/security service is a subscription to Apple's MobileMe, which costs $99 annually. That's fine if you're … Read more

General Electric and the Idaho National Laboratory are plumbing engines for a cheap source of energy: waste heat.

The two organizations said Tuesday that they have received a $2 million Department of Energy grant to further develop GE technology that converts the heat from industrial engines into electricity. That technology could make engines 20 percent to 40 percent more efficient and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The engines that run factories, mills and power plants are often only 35 percent efficient. That means the rest of the available energy from fossil fuels goes unused.

GE researchers in Germany and New York … Read more