Review: Start Menu Reviver gives Windows 8 a modern UI-style Start Menu

How you'll like Start Menu Reviver largely depends on what you want out of a Windows 8 Start Menu. If you want something that mimics the Windows 7 Start Menu exactly, you're better off with Stardock's Start8 or Iobit's Start Menu 8. If you want something that's more of a melding of Windows 8 and a start menu, Start Menu Reviver might be what you seek.

By default, Start Menu Reviver looks like an Ease of Access application for the sight-challenged, but you can reduce it to a normal size.
When you first install Start Menu Reviver, it defaults to its large size. It's handy for touchscreens, but on a monitor or laptop screen, it looks like an Ease of Access feature for the eyesight-challenged. You can select a size that is more in keeping with the aspect ratios employed throughout the desktop. Start Menu Reviver sits on the task bar approximately where you'd expect to find it, but a little to the right. As with other Start Menus for Windows 8, you can change the icon to suit your taste.

In a column on the left of Start Menu Reviver resides a list of common Windows programs (desktop and modern UI) such as Task Manager (modern UI version), Network (desktop), Run (desktop), and the user name (which actually takes you to User Account Control rather than the user folder the way that most Start menus do). To the right are My Computer, Internet Explorer (desktop), a link for the modern UI, and a bunch of other tiles representing both legacy and modern UI apps. You can freely arrange—and even resize—the tiles, just as with the Modern UI.

Start Menu Reviver's tiled UI fits well in the Win8 modern UI.
Start Menu Reviver has the usual search box at the bottom. However, this is where I first noticed that there's no tabbing between fields or sections as there is in a normal Start Menu. It can be considerably faster navigating when you can use both the mouse and the keyboard. Not everyone is touch-oriented yet.

Start Menu Reviver lacks the fine control over switching between the desktop and modern UI that the competition offers. You can have the Windows Key invoke Reviver rather than the modern UI, but that's about it. Start8 and Start Menu 8 both allow you to take the modern UI out of the mix entirely.

Start Menu Reviver is free, and it's nice that Windows 8 users have another choice when it comes to putting back the Start Menu that Microsoft so thoughtfully decided you no longer need. It's not my top choice, but not everyone works the same. Give it a spin along with the others and share your opinion.

E-Book Ruling Gives Amazon an Advantage

A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that Apple had illegally conspired with five of the six biggest publishers to try to raise prices in the budding e-books market.

The decision came two days after Barnes & Noble lost its chief executive and said it would not appoint another, signaling that the biggest chain of physical bookstores could be immediately broken up.

The verdict in the Apple case might have been a foregone conclusion, telegraphed by the judge herself, but it emphatically underlined how the traditional players in the book business have been upended. Only Amazon, led by Mr. Bezos, seems to have a plan. He is executing it with a skill that infuriates his competitors and rewards his stockholders.

“We’re at a moment when cultural power is passing to new gatekeepers,” said Joe Esposito, a publishing consultant. “Heaven forbid that we should have the government telling our entrepreneurs what to do, but there is a social policy issue here. We don’t want the companies to become a black hole that absorbs all light except their own.”

The Apple case, which was brought by the Justice Department, will have little immediate impact on the selling of books. The publishers settled long ago, protesting they had done nothing wrong but saying they could not afford to fight the government. But it might be a long time before they try to take charge of their fate again in such a bold fashion. Drawing the attention of the government once was bad enough; twice could be a disaster.

“The Department of Justice has unwittingly caused further consolidation in the industry at a time when consolidation is not necessarily a good thing,” said Mark Coker, the chief executive of Smashwords, an e-book distributor. “If you want a vibrant ecosystem of multiple publishers, multiple publishing methods and multiple successful retailers in 5, 20 or 50 years, we took a step backwards this week.”

Some in publishing suspected that Amazon had prompted the government to file its suit. The retailer has denied it, but it still emerged the big winner. While Apple will be punished — damages are yet to be decided — and the publishers were chastened, Amazon is left free to exert its dominance over e-books — even as it gains market share with physical books. The retailer declined to comment on Wednesday.

“Amazon is not in most of the headlines, but all of the big events in the book world are about Amazon,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. “If the publishers colluded, it was to blunt Amazon’s dominance. Barnes & Noble’s troubles may stem from a misstep with its Nook tablets, just as Borders’ bankruptcy might have been hastened by management mistakes, but its precarious position is that of any rent-paying retailer facing a deep-pocketed virtual competitor.”

Last week, Penguin and Random House officially merged, creating a publishing behemoth that might be able to determine its future rather than suffer the fate of Barnes & Noble, a once-swaggering entity that now seems adrift. Random House was not a target of the Justice Department; Penguin was.

Penguin and Random House were innovators who made paperbacks into a disruptive force in the 1940s and ’50s. They were the Amazons of their era, making the traditional book business deeply uneasy. No less an authority than George Orwell thought paperbacks were of so much better value than hardbacks that they spelled the ruination of publishing and bookselling. “The cheaper books become,” he wrote, “the less money is spent on books.”

Orwell was wrong, but the same arguments are being made against Amazon and e-books today. Amazon executives are not much for public debate, but they argue that all this disruption will ultimately give more money to more authors and make more books more widely available to more people at cheaper prices, and who could argue with any of that?

This was not a prospect that many on Wednesday were putting much faith in.

Amazon, its detractors argue, is not a nonprofit or public trust but a hard-nosed company whose investors hope will make lots of money someday soon. It shares closed Wednesday at $292.33, a record.

“The Justice Department’s guns seem pointed in the wrong direction,” Mr. Aiken said.

But the more pressing concern for the industry is the fate of Barnes & Noble. When Borders collapsed two years ago, analysts said there was an unexpected consequence to the loss of 400 stores: the e-book growth rate began to taper off, as readers could no longer examine new titles before ordering them from Amazon.

E-books, in other words, were not a magical technology that could shed all the existing infrastructure of publishing. They needed the existing ecosystem.

“If all of those corporate outlets vanish, there is suddenly a hell of a lot less space devoted to showcasing a large number of titles,” said J. B. Dickey, owner of the Seattle Mystery Bookshop. “We’ll probably see a continuing shrinking in print runs, maybe fewer titles published, fewer authors published and the New York houses retreating into the known best-sellers. Which means more novice and midlist authors scrambling to find a way to stay in print and more authors self-publishing their print books — or more likely releasing their works as e-files.”

All of that sounds dire. Perhaps the only consolation for those who fear the power of Amazon is the knowledge that all companies eventually peak, no matter how unlikely that seems when they are in the ascendance.

Mr. Esposito, the consultant, remembered that 30 years ago there was a book called “The Media Monopoly,” which worried about the excessive power of the Gannett chain of newspapers as well as the three major television networks.

“The book reads almost quaint now,” Mr. Esposito said.

Jessica Simpson Gives Birth to Baby Boy

Jessica Simpson and Eric Johnson

Jessica Simpson is a new mom -- again.

The Fashion Star mentor gave birth to a baby boy, named Ace Knute, with fiance Eric Johnson on Sunday, her rep confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter. The baby's middle name -- pronounced "Ka-nute" -- is said to be the first name of Johnson's Swedish paternal grandfather.

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Ace was delivered via C-section in Los Angeles. He joins big sister Maxwell, 14 months old. Us Weekly first reported the news of Simpson's newborn son.

Simpson accidentally let it slip that she was having a boy during a March appearance on ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live.

"I just feel awful. I've been vomiting," she said. "The crazy thing is, I never knew a wiener could actually make me nauseous."

She then caught herself and said: "Well, I guess I just told the world I'm having a boy."

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At first, Kimmel didn't seem to realize what Simpson had revealed, saying: "Oh, I didn't even know it was that. I thought maybe you were having a girl with a penis," he quipped.

Simpson has served as a mentor on NBC's Fashion Star for two seasons. She also has her own successful line of clothing.

U.K. regulator gives Google 35 days to scrap its remaining Street View data

A U.K. regulatory group is giving Google 35 days to delete what remains of the data collected by its Street View cars in the U.K., and is using the threat of legal action to compel the company to comply.

The request, which was served to Google in the form of an enforcement notice from the Information Commissioner’s Office, the U.K. government’s data and privacy regulator, follows a reopening of an investigation into Google’s Street View project.

In 2010, that investigation revealed “a significant breach of the Data Protection Act,” when Google Street View cars collected payload data through the company’s Wi-Fi mapping efforts in the U.K., by scraping personal data including emails, URLs and passwords.

Google agreed to delete the payload data following that investigation, but when reaching this week’s decision, “the ICO also considered the discovery of additional disks containing payload data, which were located by Google while the reopened ICO investigation was in progress,” the group said Thursday in a statement.

“Today’s enforcement notice strengthens the action already taken by our office, placing a legal requirement on Google to delete the remaining payload data identified last year within the next 35 days and immediately inform the ICO if any further disks are found,” the ICO said.

“Failure to abide by the notice will be considered as contempt of court, which is a criminal offense,” the ICO said.

Google claims to be cooperating. “We work hard to get privacy right at Google,” a spokeswoman said in a statement. “But in this case we didn’t, which is why we quickly tightened up our systems to address the issue.”

“We cooperated fully with the ICO throughout its investigation, and having received its order this morning we are proceeding with our plan to delete the data,” the company said.

“The project leaders never wanted this data, and didn’t use it or even look at it,” the spokeswoman added.

Based on the ICO’s investigation, the breach failed to meet the level required to levy a financial penalty, the ICO said.

That assessment differs somewhat from that of German regulators, who levied a fine of €145,000 (US$190,000) against Google in April for the company’s gathering and storing of emails, photos, passwords and chat protocols from unprotected Wi-Fi networks using Street View cars.

In the U.S., Google has already entered into a settlement to pay $7 million related to complaints from dozens of states about unauthorized collection of personal data transmitted over Wi-Fi networks.

Google must be very careful about how it collects data going forward, according to the ICO.

“The early days of Google Street View should be seen as an example of what can go wrong if technology companies fail to understand how their products are using personal information,” said Stephen Eckersley, head of enforcement at ICO, in a statement.

“The punishment for this breach would have been far worse, if this payload data had not been contained,” he said.