A small but understandably very upset group of people are reporting a bug in Snow Leopard that totally wipes out account data without warning. The consensus is that it has something to do with guest accounts: the data loss seems to come directly after using one, when trying to log back into a regular account.

Documentation on the problem is still thin, and Apple hasn't issued any kind of response, but until this gets sussed out, you should probably cut back on the guest logins, lest you lose everything you've ever saved to your Mac, ever. Any new operating system has bugs, but if real—and it's starting to look that way—this one is pretty atrocious.

We’ll keep an eye on this, since the more exposure it gets, the more likely people are to come forward with their own personal horror stories. Post ‘em if you got ‘em, in the comments. [ITWire via Neowin]

Nasa has been successful in its bid to bomb the moon in a search for water, with its LCROSS spacecraft smashing a rocket into the lunar surface earlier today.

Although we are yet to hear if there is actual water beneath the surface of the moon, Nasa streamed the whole explosive affair live on its Nasa TV service, showing workers for the space company whooping and clapping for joy when the empty rocket hit.

Travelling at speeds of 1.6 miles a second, the rockets were propelled from Nasa’s Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Spacecraft (LCROSS), swiftly followed by a probe rocket.

The probe will be sniffing around to see if any ice or water particles are found as a result of the explosion.

Manned moon base

There is great significance in finding water on the moon, as it could pave the way for a self-sufficient space base which Nasa hopes to build by 2024.

The Telegraph is reporting that Nasa had a great deal of help from Durham University back in the UK in finding the right spot to ‘drill’ for water, with Dr Vincent Eke, from the Institute for Computational Cosmology at the University of Durham, telling the paper: “Water ice could be stable for billions of years on the Moon provided that it is cold enough.

“If ice is present in the permanently shaded lunar craters of the Moon then it could potentially provide a water source for the eventual establishment of a manned base on the Moon.

“Such a base could be used as a platform for exploration into the further reaches of our solar system.”

As long as they call the moon-base Moonraker, whatever they use the space station for is fine by us.

Filed under: Office, Microsoft

While I haven’t had any customers ask to purchase Microsoft Works in years, it still appears on the odd retail boxed laptop. With the coming release of Office 2010, Microsoft has decided it’s high time to tag and bag Works and replace it.

Stepping in to fill the void will be Office 2010 Starter, which will be targeted at the average consumer’s needs. Starter will package only Word and Excel with basic creation and editing abilities, and will be ad-supported.

Over on the Office Engineering Blog, VP Takeshi Numoto posted “Office Starter 2010 will provide new PC owners with immediate exposure to the Office 2010 experience on new PCs right out of the box.” You know, kind of like how just about every boxed PC does that now with the 60-day Office 2007 trial. Except instead of a time-limited but full-featured Office experience, you’ll get a stripped-down feature set at no cost. Ever.

Microsoft dangled another Office lock-in carrot recently with the introduction of Office Web Apps. Whatever the motivation - competition with Google Docs and OpenOffice.Org, for example - I’m sure most Windows users will welcome the opportunity to get any legal MS Office apps for free.

Hmm…Office Starter, huh? There’s not going to be some asinine 7 document limit in this thing, right?

[via CNet]

Goodbye MS Works, hello ad-supported Office 2010 Starter! originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Sponsored Topics:
Microsoft Works - Microsoft - MicrosoftOffice - OpenOffice.Org - Google Docs

Twitter suspends the account of a security researcher after he Tweets a warning to users about a phishing site.

Coinciding with the introduction of the Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system, Microsoft has upgraded and launched its free phone backup service My Phone – previously in beta – and added a couple of useful premium features to it.

Despite the fact that the official My Phone blog and Twitter account remain silent for the time being, users have definitely taken notice and started tweeting about it.

If you have a Windows Mobile 6 phone, you can use Microsoft My Phone to backup all your data, including your contacts, calendar, photos and more to a password-protected website. When you switch to a new Windows phone, or you lose (data on) your current one, you can head to the website to restore documents, contacts, music, and anything else you synced in just a few clicks.

The website also gives you an easy way to organize your phone photos, or to search your text messages and anything else you synced to the service. In addition, you get an easy starting point for redistributing media to your Windows Live account or other social networks, either from your phone or the web application. All in all, it’s a no-brainer to start using it if you carry a Windows phone. Most newer Windows phones come with the program pre-installed anyway, but you can also download it to your device on the fly right here.

Microsoft does not charge a fee for using My Phone, although it new boasts a couple of Premium Features which require a charge ($4.99). These features are:

- Ring Your Phone: remotely have your device ring (even if it is set to “silent” or “vibrate” mode) so it’s easier for you to retrieve in case you misplaced it
- Locate your phone: in case someone stole your phone and left it on, this feature will enable the GPS receiver on your device and show it on a map
- Lock your Phone: will lock your phone and display a message (e.g. your name and contact information) in case you have lost your phone and a good soul finds it
- Erase your phone: remotely wipe off all data from your phone

All these features are free to trial for 60 days.

Give it a whirl and tell us what you think.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

A security researcher who disclosed a serious vulnerability in online certificates has been blocked from accessing his PayPal account after someone released a counterfeit PayPal certificate he created for a professional training session.

The mythical city of Chako Paul is allegedly in Sweden. It is supposedly populated only by lesbians. And Chinese men’s enthusiasm to get there is, according to reports, having serious effect on the Web.

Google has pulled its Google Groups development team out of the basement broom closet and begun patching up its long-broken Usenet library, in response to our post Wednesday highlighting the company’s neglect of the 700 million post archive.

Google’s browser is the latest to get support for a nascent standard for building accelerated 3D graphics into Web pages and Web applications.

PDFs, the file format often used for “official” documents and typically opened with the frustratingly slow Adobe Reader, are starting to get much more manageable, thanks to companies like Scribd and Docstoc, which make them embeddable, and Google, who has built its own web-based PDF viewer into Gmail and Google Docs.

Now, that same functionality has arrived in Google search results. PDFs now include a “quick view” link, which opens up the given file in your web browser. From there, Google has options like zoom, paging, print, and search.

The company says that they’ve been able to do this for more than half of the PDFs in its index – the ones that haven’t yet been converted will still have the “View as HTML” option if you’d like to avoid the download.

This feature has been one of my favorite additions to Gmail, as it eliminates the need to download and then open a PDF on the desktop with Adobe Reader, which can grind system performance to a halt. Now that it’s a part of search results too, there aren’t too many scenarios in which you’ll still need to view PDFs the old fashioned way. And that’s a good thing.

Tags: Google, pdfs, Search