expert

Sometimes I worry.

I worry that at the bottom of the fiscal cliff is another fiscal cliff.

I worry that my future wife who currently won't acknowledge me will only, in fact, acknowledge me when I have another future wife.

And I worry that social media experts have all the expertise of a Labrador offering a lecture series on the cat-mouse conflict.

It's not merely that "Saturday Night Live" and the Onion (embedded here) have offered bitingly believable critiques of these self-appointed gurus.

It's that I have before my eyes the results of a survey … Read more

Prophecy Expert is an interesting concept; it's a free Bible study program with a desktop interface that imports Web-based content, including many commentaries and references as well as social networking and other interactive features. It's provided by Minister Fortson, aka Dante Fortson, whose Web site claims to offer "a Christian perspective on angels, aliens, demons, giants, nephilim, and other supernatural phenomena." Say what you will (and who doesn't?) the Minister correctly points out that many Bible study programs are expensive rip-offs that charge for access to free Web-based resources. Prophecy Expert certainly enables users to … Read more

Looking for a program to manage a number of lists associated with billing and inventory for a single company? Then you may want to check out Invoice Expert XE Lite. Although not all of the features offered are available in the Lite version, this freeware can help small companies manage lists of invoices and other company-related information.

Invoice Experts' setup wizard allows you to establish tax settings as you set up your company, so the program automatically calculates taxes when adding invoices or products. Upon first glance, you're greeted with a cluttered but intuitive interface. Invoice Expert XE Lite … Read more

Over the past decade, we've heard a lot about the coming consumerization of information technology. Well, it's here. The Web, e-mail, mobile phones, automated teller machines, GPS navigators, supermarket self-checkouts, online banking, digital cameras, instant messaging, chat rooms, online shopping, airline e-tickets, iTunes, YouTube, Facebook--you name it. Every one of them puts large swaths of the population in direct, frequent contact with sophisticated IT systems and interfaces. And this is just the short list.

It's an overstatement to say "everyone's on Facebook" or "everyone has a smartphone"--but not by much. Something like 50 percent of the U.S. population is on Facebook … Read more

Although many people keep valuables or sensitive information in a safe or locked filing cabinet, people aren't always so careful with what's on their computers. CryptoExpert Lite makes it easy to create the electronic equivalent of a safe, giving users a secure place to store sensitive documents of all sorts.

The program's interface is fairly intuitive and easy to navigate. It's split into three panes that let users navigate to drives, folders, and individual files. To create a new encrypted drive image file, simply click New, and the program opens a wizard that walks you through … Read more

A federal court judge has likely dealt a death blow to LimeWire, one of the most popular and oldest file-sharing systems, according to legal experts.

On Wednesday, CNET broke the news that U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood granted summary judgment in favor of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which filed a copyright lawsuit against LimeWire in 2006. In her decision, Wood ruled Lime Group, parent of LimeWire software maker Lime Wire, and founder Mark Gorton committed copyright infringement, induced copyright infringement, and engaged in unfair competition.

"It is obviously a fairly fatal decision for them," … Read more

What is there to say about Lotto007 Prediction Expert? If it really worked, do you think you'd be able to buy it on Download.com for $79? We think not. That said, we suppose that some programs of this sort are better than others, and this one does purport to actually analyze patterns in previous winning numbers in order to predict future winning combinations. We don't honestly think this program will improve your chances of winning the lottery, but it might be marginally better than some other programs.

The program's interface is plain and fairly intuitive. Users … Read more

Last week's guide to becoming an expert at YouTube was quite popular, so we decided to do a follow-up in video form.

Included are some of our tips from the guide that could have used a little help from on-screen examples. We think you'll find they're quite a bit easier to understand once you see the before and after; especially in the case of YouTube's machine tags, which can change the way other people see your videos.

In just a few minutes we cover: • How to make YouTube always play the high quality stream • Focus on … Read more

In the past, we've done Newbie's Guides for certain services, but we wanted to switch things up and really dig into a product's advanced features.

Video-sharing site YouTube is the perfect service to start with because it's massively popular and incredibly simple to use, but also has a few powerful features that are tucked away. This guide is to help you learn how to use some of these advanced features and to serve as a simple reference page.

For the sake of simplicity, we're only covering searching, viewing, and sharing. We've skipped uploading since it's pretty straightforward and made simple with the service's recently launched multifile uploader. We're also not including any third-party downloading tools because that is against YouTube's terms of use and is already an official first-party feature on some content.

Using YouTube's search tool: YouTube's search engine works a lot like Google's. In fact, it uses the same search operators to let you tweak your results. Here are some worth remembering the next time you're looking for a video:

• Limit to words in the title. Putting "allintitle:" in front of your search keeps YouTube's results limited to those videos with the matching words in the title. This is great if you want to keep it from searching through descriptions or tags. Not so useful if the video you're looking for has a misspelled or misleading title.

• Exclude a term. Add a "-" then the word you want to exclude will keep it out of the results. So if you're searching for explosions but don't want to see videos with diet Coke or Mentos, you'd type in "Explosion -diet -coke -mentos." Be sure to add the "-" in front of every word you don't want.

• Play the wildcard. If you're too lazy to type a word, or think that YouTube will figure out the words you're leaving out, you can just put in an asterisk in place of that word. In practice, this means that searching for something like "Fallout: Broken Steel" you could just type "Fallout * Steel" and have it guess the word in the middle.

If you can't remember these off the top of your head you can find them in YouTube's advanced search box, which shows up as an option in the results of any completed search. It's also worth going there if you want to filter how long the videos in the results should be. This is a great way to find long-form content that's 20 minutes or more.

Search and browse with your eyes. If titles and thumbnails are not enough, you can explore additional, related video clusters by using YouTube's warp feature. This is a feature that can still be found on some videos, but YouTube has since relegated it to its TestTube section. That doesn't mean you can't use it on any old video though. Simply inserting "warp.swf" in the URL instead of the word "watch" will send you into full-screen "warp speed" mode. To read more about how to use this feature check out our coverage of it.

Third-party search tools There are a handful of third-party YouTube search engines and tools that add a little bit of utility on top of YouTube's search. Here are some of our favorites:… Read more