It was reported today that Opera is being sold to a Chinese technology group who plan to use it as a platform to promote their products.

Although Firefox remains my default browser, Opera is what I use most of the time for surfing and reading online. We'll see what the new owners do, but I'm not optimistic about the future.

Let's hope that Vivaldi gets its act together soon.

Monday, VMware laid off their entire U.S. development staff for Desktop products, which includes Workstation, Player and Fusion.

The company did say that they were moving development for those products to China, which probably means they will keep the products alive as long as they can charge for them, but I don’t expect much more than that.

InfoWorld has an interesting survey of data recovery & forensic tools. You need to register as an "Insider" to read the full article, which is well worthwhile, but here is the author's summary:

   Which recovery tool is for you?  PhotoRec and companion TestDisk have
   consistently been among the most useful, performant, flexible, and
   inexpensive applications available for data recovery.  They don’t have
   the breadth of options of some of the other apps examined here, but it’s
   almost impossible to go wrong with them as a first step.

   Sleuth Kit/Autopsy is more of a full toolbox than a single wrench or
   hammer, and for that reason might be intimidating to work with,
   especially if all you need to do is recover a particular file.  But for
   those who need the full toolbox, it is a great way to have one for no
   initial cost.  SystemRescueCd also rolls up a great many tools into one
   bundle, but it’s strictly for experts.  Those afraid of the command line
   shouldn’t even think of using it.

   Kroll Ontrack EasyRecovery Enterprise stands out with its RAID recovery
   function, and it’s recommended for those who need that capability.  For
   those who don't, many of its other features can be found in other
   programs, like Remo Recover.

   Remo Recover stood out for making it easy to save out image files from
   media, and for having some fairly exotic camera file types as part of
   its database.  CardRecovery supported a number of those file types as
   well, although its slow scanning and slightly clumsy interface worked
   against it.

   Finally, Recuva packs a lot of great features into one program:  fast
   scanning, a convenient interface, and useful details about what’s
   recoverable and what’s not.  It should be in every Windows user's
   toolbox

The main takeaway is that the best tools for most users are the free ones: PhotoRec, Sleuth Kit/Autopsy, Recuva and System Recovery CD.