engineering

Avast Free Antivirus for Mac is Avast's answer to concerns about how to browse safely. The application is packaged with a brand-new, easy-to-understand graphical user interface, with access to all features available at single click.

The application's onscreen tools are well-organized, and its live graphics enhance the feeling of safety -- you can see that the antivirus software doesn't sleep and is always working to protect you from any viruses circulating on the Web. Avast's free software provides three shields to protect your computer: a file system shield, an e-mail shield, and a Web shield. With … Read more

LinkedIn is so 2011.

In the red-hot market for skilled software engineers, companies looking to make great hires are discovering that relying on traditional services that showcase candidates' work histories -- but not their actual work -- is a great way to miss out on the best available talent.

These days, there's a new game in town -- GitHub, a place where hiring managers and recruiters alike are increasingly turning to find not just the potential employees who look best on paper, but the ones that actively (and publicly) demonstrate their capabilities.

Last month, Andreessen Horowitz, one of the … Read more

Are you a tech startup desperate to hire the best talent around and looking for a central repository of skilled engineers? Or a kick-butt coder trying to get in on the ground floor of a hot new venture? AngelList may have just the place to go.

This evening, AngelList, a service whose alumni companies have raised more than $1.1 billion in funding, launched a new talent portal, a one-stop shop where startups can search for qualified tech talent, and where skilled engineers and others can seek out the best new companies.

"We noticed that people were using AngelList … Read more

Microsoft is bulking up design teams for next-gen Surface devices, despite the pleas of PC partners like Acer.

Acer recently asked Microsoft to reconsider its Surface strategy, but Redmond seems to be doing just the opposite, as dozens of job postings on its career page attest. Some of the job postings seem to imply that Surface products are the true expressions of Microsoft's vision.

"The Surface Team focuses on building devices that fully express the Windows vision," a few of the job listings say.

And that's the whole point of Surface, isn't it? Microsoft needed … Read more

Former Gizmodo reporter Mat Honan is blaming an AppleCare technician for allowing his personal e-mail and Twitter accounts to be hacked, as well as the tech blog's official feed.

The Gizmodo breach, apparently perpetrated by a person or group of people calling themselves Clan W3, was brief but resulted in racist and offensive tweets being sent to the tech blog's 415,000 followers on Friday. Gizmodo initially blamed its former reporter for the tweets and quickly regained control of its account.

But Honan, who currently works for Wired, was not so fortunate. He described in a blog post … Read more

If you searched for something on Google today, you may have noticed something different, such as a new drop-down menu of search tools. This is the latest in Google's changes to how query results are displayed and how its search engine works.

Google's redesign was first noticed by TechCrunch, which noted that the major difference is the results are now vertical. Rather than having the search tools taking up space on a sidebar, they are now located directly under the search field.

The search engine has already started showing an automatic text box in the right side bar … Read more

It seems that everyone is going to London lately, so why should the world's largest social network be left out?

Facebook announced today it has opened an engineering office in the U.K. capital, its first engineering office outside the U.S. Calling London "a perfect fit" for Facebook engineering, Facebook software engineer and London team leader Philip Su touted the city's advantages in a Facebook post this evening.

"It's a global hub, and it has a vibrant local startup community with lots of great technical talent," Su said. "Our team in … Read more

Japan's nuclear spring didn't last long. Though the country's nuclear power plants were taken offline following the Fukushima nuclear disaster last year, the government restarted a reactor earlier this month.

But that hasn't stopped a small village some 50 miles from the Oi plant from ditching conventional electricity from the grid and going solar.

Sanno in Hyogo Prefecture, population 42, has become the first municipality to rely on solar power.

Residents of the 11 households have an average age over 60, and the village, like many in rural Japan, is suffering depopulation. Costs for maintaining shared … Read more

LA JOLLA, Calif.--Cottages shouldn't stick out way over the edge of buildings, but when they've been picked up by mysterious forces and dropped out of the sky, that's exactly what can happen.

Welcome to Korean artist Do Ho Suh's "Fallen Star," a small, New England-style house that was unveiled in June atop -- and well out beyond the roof of -- the Jacobs Engineering School building at the University of California at San Diego here.

I've come to explore "Fallen Star" as part of Road Trip 2012, and though I'… Read more