Microsoft will probably price its own 8-inch Surface tablet running Windows RT at $349, just 6 percent higher than Apple's iPad Mini but nowhere near the basement $199 of Android rivals, an analyst said last week. Sameer Singh, an analyst who covers tablets and smartphones at his Tech-Thoughts website, pegged the price of using a bill of materials (BOM) estimate largely based on industry-wide commodity component costs. Using the same techniques last year—akin to the "virtual" tear-downs that other research firms have conducted before a rumored product is actually released—Singh accurately predicted the eventual retail prices of Microsoft's Surface RT and Surface Pro tablets. His sight-unseen BOM for an 8-inch, 16GB Surface RT tablet totaled $203.40, which included a $13 charge for manufacturing.
Both Facebook and Microsoft said late Friday that they had been given permission from the U.S. government to disclose how many times the two companies had been asked to turn over user information to the Feds as part of a national security order. However, the data comes with so many caveats that little information can be gleaned from it. For their part, Google and Twitter opted out of similar disclosures, precisely for those reasons. For the six months ended December 31, 2012, Microsoft received between 6,000 and 7,000 criminal and national security warrants, subpoenas and orders affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 consumer accounts from U.S. governmental entities, the company said in a blog post. For its part, Facebook said that it had received 9,000 requests of the same nature during the same period. Both Facebook and Microsoft have been named in as the source of the information.
Reader Tammy wrote in with this hassle: "Whenever I try to print a page from the Internet, the size of the print and the photos is extremely small and difficult to read. I do not have this problem with Word documents." Tammy says she uses Windows 8, but neglected to specify which browser--so I'm going to assume Internet Explorer. Let me be the first to note that Internet Explorer can be terrible when it comes to printing. On my Windows 8 system, for example, I went to any number of pages on Microsoft's MSN (the default site for IE), then loaded Print Preview. The result every single time: several pages of little more than links, with none of the actual text of the story I was viewing.
Tweeting has become so popular that the Oxford English Dictionary broke one of its own rules to add "tweet" to its lexicon this month. "Tweet" is listed as both a noun and a verb that's used in social networking. The addition stands out because it breaks an Oxford English Dictionary rule that a word needs to be in use for ten years to be considered for inclusion. Since the Twitter social network just turned seven in March, the word aficionados broke their own rule by three years. The word was given special consideration because it so quickly became widely-used in the English language.
Shipments of new Symbian smartphones from Nokia are rapidly dying, less than three years after the last time it topped the list of the world's most-used mobile platforms. The rapid and stark decline of Symbian serves as a warning about what can happen to top smartphone operating systems, even iOS and Android, in a volatile market, analysts said. In another decade, pray tell, where will the iPhone stand? Despite Symbian's recent place among the ranks of the tech greats, there won't be many tears shed for its demise, or many fond remembrances. There won't be a short epitaph on a tombstone somewhere in Espoo, Finland, Nokia's hometown.
Go ahead and ask CSOs from the nation's largest banks about the myriad distributed denial-of-service attacks they've experienced in recent months. They're not going to tell you anything. Security execs have never been comfortable talking about these attacks because they don't want to draw more attention to their companies. They worry that offering even the basic details of their defensive strategy will inspire attackers to find the holes. But many companies are finding themselves under attack for the first time, and their security chiefs need answers if they're going to fight back. So despite knowing CSOs are reluctant to talk, we tried to get answers anyway. We offered several CSOs anonymity to tell their stories, a tactic that always worked before. Not this time.
The consumer electronics market is being flooded with devices that have incredible high-resolution screens. phones have them. has one, as do the Archos 97 Titanium HD, Onda V972, Freelander PD80, Ainol NOVO9 Spark, Cube U9GT5 and others. MacBook Pro with Retina display, Asus Zenbook Prime UX31A, Asus Zenbook UX32VD, Dell XPS 12, Dell XPS 13, Samsung Series 9, Sony Vaio Duo 11 and others.
Inkjets, which are losing some of their cachet among consumers, are finding new jobs in small offices and workgroups. We’ve tested enough business models over the past couple of years to prove that in the sub-$500 space. A good place to start is with HP's $400 OfficeJet Pro 276dw. It is expensive to buy, but it's also an excellent inkjet multifunction whose enhanced manageability features lets it play nice even in the corporate environment. The 276dw also installs easily, produces nice output quickly, and ink costs are low. The 276dw is a dark-chocolatey shade of brown, which, while a bit old-school, works well with the printer's soft edges and corners. It sports a large, 4.3-inch touchscreen control panel with a well thought-out menu structure that makes it easy to operate. Software includes HP scan, remote email printing, and a complete onboard management console accessible via your Web browser. Management features include email alerts, a firewall, proxy support, etc. You can reach the management interface via the control panel or your browser. The 276dw sports Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and USB, so you may attach it to your network in any fashion and location that you want. Installation was a breeze: There were no firewall hassles, or other such configuration issues that we commonly see, though there are quite a few dialogs to wade through. Push-scanning to our test PC from the 276dw's control panel was available almost immediately. Quite often it takes printers an inordinate amount of time to get their networking act together.
at the U.S. National Security Agency has generated heated debate in the U.S. and across the world about privacy. The NSA is collecting metadata on U.S. residents’ phone calls made on Verizon’s network and Internet records from nine Web companies, including Facebook, Google and Microsoft, according to reports in the Guardian and The Washington Post newspapers. But intelligence agencies in other countries have similar goals, according to reports, and in some cases there are few details about what data these governments are collecting. by former contractor Edward Snowden have led to questions in the U.K. about the data that intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is collecting. Facing questions about GCHQ’s access to Internet data collected through the NSA’s PRISM program, Prime Minister David Cameron defended U.K. intelligence services and said they comply with the law. . “We cannot give a running commentary on the intelligence services. I am satisfied that the intelligence services, who do a fantastically important job to keep us safe, operate within the law and within a legal framework and they also operate within a proper framework of scrutiny by the intelligence and security committee.”
Could Samsung's "next big thing" come from the heart of the Big Apple or Silicon Valley? The smartphone and consumer electronics maker is close to launching an incubator space for startups that are developing software and services for phones, tablet computers and televisions. Based in Palo Alto's University Avenue and in New York's Chelsea neighborhood, the Samsung Accelerator is on the verge of opening its doors, and the company is already looking for its first round of early stage companies. "We're looking for bright ideas to build the next next big thing," says a sign that went up this week outside the accelerator's space at the Varsity Theater in Palo Alto (the building pictured up top).
Microsoft’s Office Mobile for iPhone is a “half-baked” effort that breaks basic features like file compatibility, according to the chief executive of rival CloudOn, which provides Office compatibility across the Apple iPhone, iPad, and Android platforms. However, Milind Gadekar, CloudOn’s chief executive, acknowledged that Microsoft’s offering was superior in its offline capabilities, a lead that it hopes to erase throughout the rest of the year. in the cloud, for free, with the ability to save documents to a number of online storage providers. On the other hand, it requires a persistent online connection, and can suffer a performance hit if the connection is poor or drops. Nevertheless, CloudOn’s true Office compatibility and ability to export documents to a number of providers makes its solution the right one if an iOS user wants Office compatibility, Gadekar said. It already boasts 4 million users, he said.
Greater transparency, as well as respect for the Internet’s open architecture and multi-stakeholder participation, are needed to help guide discussions around intellectual property policy on the Internet, according to the Internet Society. Those principles and others comprise a new set of standards designed partly to address the explosion of content that has hit the Internet in recent years and to help ensure that the channels for distributing it are legally sound, the nonprofit group said. by the Internet Society focusing on intellectual property on the Internet. “With the emergence of the Internet, intellectual property law and policy making have been challenged on many fronts, including the one concerning the procedures that traditionally have been employed by policy makers and legislators to create, draft and implement intellectual property regulation,” reads the document, released Friday.
Windows users know it’s a good idea to apply security fixes to their PCs as soon as patches are publicly released to prevent malicious actors from infiltrating their machines. But what if, before a patch was issued, the U.S. government was able to exploit those vulnerabilities using information fed to it by Microsoft? suggests is happening in a recent report exposing a deep working relationship between a number of technology companies and American intelligence agencies. Microsoft provides the government with information about flaws in its software before publicly releasing a bug fix, the news agency reported today. Microsoft reportedly has no knowledge of what the government does with the security information it provides, but two anonymous U.S. officials told Bloomberg that Microsoft is aware that the vulnerability information provided allows the U.S. to exploit the computers of terrorists and foreign governments. the Pentagon's plan to expand its cyber command more than five-fold.
Microsoft's release of an Office suite for the iPhone is too little, too late and yet another timid move aimed at protecting Windows 8 sales at the expense of customer demand for a product like this one for iPads, according to analysts. Microsoft should have released full, native Office versions for both iPhones and iPads last year or in 2011, but the company has been reticent to do so, likely to use Office as a differentiator for Windows devices, in particular those running Windows 8, analysts said. Also missing at this stage of the game are Office versions for Android smartphones and tablets, but the biggest gap is the iPad, the world's most popular tablet, which is being used for work by tens of millions of people worldwide. Thus, Friday's announcement by Microsoft of what it calls Office Mobile for iPhone is underwhelming.
When you rely on iTunes to manage your music collection and all of the apps and files you store on your iOS device, its library can quickly become unmanageable…and Apple doesn't like to give you a whole lot of control over how you organize it. Enter iTunes Library Toolkit, a handy application that offers you control over at least part of your iTunes library. ITunes Library Toolkit is free to try for one month. After that you'll have to pay 3.5 Great Britain Pounds ($5 as of 6/12/13) for a one-year license. And it is the kind of application that you'll want to use more than once, as its goal is to offer "ongoing maintenance of your iTunes Library." To that end, it allows you automatically add new media files to iTunes, remove dead links from iTunes, and update the metadata on iTunes files. ITunes Library Toolkit is a newer application from Klarita, which also offers a similar program called . iTunes Folder Watch serves one dedicated function: Adding new media to iTunes from watched folders. iTunes Library Toolkit offers this feature, too, but without some of the finer-tuned controls that iTunes Folder Watch offers, such as the ability to manually override any additions. Removing dead links—those references to files that no longer exist—is easy, and I was surprised to see how many iTunes Library Toolkit was able to clean up for me. I do wish the application let you preview the links before you removed them, instead of after the task has been handled. ITunes Library Toolkit does check to make sure it is not misidentifying live links as dead ones, though, and it made no errors in my tests.
In Evoland, you play a nameless (until you eventually unlock the ability to name yourself) adventurer, who wanders a rapidly changing world, stabbing monsters and looking for chests, without purpose (until you unlock the "Storyline" feature). Evoland began as a contest entry for 24-hour videogame design, and was sufficiently well received that Shiro Games expanded it into a full commercial product.
WiDi? It’s not a typo. In fact, it might just be the best thing since, well, WiFi. Short for Intel Wireless Display technology, WiDi lets you stream movies, games, slide decks, and more from your Ultrabook™ to your TV or projector. Usually this kind of connectivity would require a cable or two, but with WiDi you get to cut the cord. And when you do, it opens up a world of possibilities. You can play the latest Tomb Raider game on your big-screen TV, show your friends a slideshow of vacation photos, gather the family around to watch favorite YouTube videos, or share a PowerPoint presentation with co-workers—all without the usual cable-connection hassles. WiDi delivers both audio and video, and can stream full 1080p content. So if you download, say, a movie from Amazon or iTunes, or want to stream some episodes of “Downton Abbey” from Netflix, you can view everything in all its high-definition glory on your HDTV. And for those who like a second screen while watching, Intel’s WiDi Widget lets you use your Ultrabook for other things (e-mail, Web browsing, etc.) without interrupting the video. If you’re into games, WiDi promises extra-low latency—meaning there should be almost no delay between the action on your Ultrabook and what you see on the big screen. And if your Ultrabook has accelerometers or supports motion capture, you can take advantage of WiDi for motion-controlled games. (Anyone for full-body Pong?)
If you’re thinking about encrypting email in light of revelations about U.S. government spying, you may be wasting your time. Recent leaks about have sparked a wide range of questions during the last week over online privacy, or lack thereof, as well as possible violations of the Constitution. But at this stage, the exact methods employed by the nation’s top intelligence agencies to gather information in the interest of national security are still fuzzy. At the very least, the NSA has confirmed that it is to examine their metadata and analyze call patterns between people. The NSA’s Prism system apparently goes even further, reportedly accessing servers at Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and other major companies, to collect data that the agency is storing for possible surveillance and investigations. With such large amounts of personal data at stake, one question is the extent to which encryption—a process for scrambling digital information so only certain groups of people can decipher it—can succeed in shielding consumers from government surveillance.
In the new update of DB2, released Friday, IBM has added a set of acceleration technologies, collectively code-named BLU, that promise to make the venerable database management system (DBMS) better suited for running large in-memory data analysis jobs. "BLU has significant benefits for the analytic and reporting workloads," said Tim Vincent, IBM's vice president and chief technology officer for information management software. (a development code name that stood for Big data, Lightening fast, Ultra easy) is a bundle of novel techniques for columnar processing, data deduplication, parallel vector processing and data compression. The focus of BLU was to enable databases to be "memory optimized," Vincent said. "It will run in memory, but you don't have to put everything in memory." The BLU technology can also eliminate the need for a lot of hand-tuning of SQL queries to boost performance. Because of BLU, DB2 10.5 could speed data analysis by 25 times or more, IBM claimed. This improvement could eliminate the need to purchase a separate in-memory database—such as Oracle's TimesTen—for speedy data analysis and transaction processing jobs. "We're not forcing you from a cost model perspective to size your database so everything fits in memory," Vincent said.
U.S. President Barack Obama has directed federal agencies to take new steps toward sharing their wireless spectrum with commercial operators, in an effort to meet growing demands for mobile data services. Obama, in , created a spectrum policy team to move agencies toward sharing spectrum, and he directed the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to publish a report detailing agency usage of spectrum that could be shared with commercial users. Obama also directed the NTIA to create a pilot program to monitor spectrum use in real time in an effort to look for ways to more efficiently use spectrum, and he told agencies they must consider spectrum efficiency when buying new radio equipment. While the U.S. Federal Communications Commission is looking to free up 500MHz of spectrum for commercial uses, more spectrum is needed, Obama said in the memo. With federal agencies holding a large amount of spectrum, to get more spectrum in the hands of commercial users, the memo said.
Europe's justice commissioner will not sacrifice European citizens' rights for U.S. national security, she said Friday. Commissioner Viviane Reding spoke after meeting with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder after sending him a long list of questions regarding the U.S. She is responsible for the European Union's data protection laws. The collection and analysis of newspapers last week. Despite welcoming plans to set up a committee of experts from both sides of the Atlantic, Reding said that "the concept of national security does not mean that 'anything goes': States do not enjoy an unlimited right of secret surveillance."
A French court of appeal has rejected a move by Twitter seeking to shield the identities of those responsible for posts last year contravening French laws on hate speech and carrying the hashtag #unbonjuif (a good Jew). The appeals court upheld a ruling in a case brought last November by the French Jewish Students Union (UEJF) and four other French antiracism organizations, seeking to compel Twitter to reveal the identities of the posters and to provide a simple way for its users to flag similarly illegal messages. On Jan. 24, the , giving it 15 days from receipt of the order in which to comply. Twitter lodged an appeal against the ruling on March 21, just days after the and its CEO Dick Costolo, alleging they had failed to provide the information and seeking $51 million in damages.
Will the last one to leave please turn out the ? This week, Finnish smartphone creator Nokia announced that it had shipped its final handset running the Symbian operating system. As the last company in the world building phones using the Symbian OS, Nokia's withdrawal from the platform means Symbian is now completely defunct. Symbian's fall from dominance is a tale about which books can (and should) be written. Its origins date to the '80s, but as of 1998, Symbian's existence was formalized when an old PDA company, Psion, changed its name to Symbian and took funding from the major phone manufacturers at the time, including Ericsson and Motorola, to become the official caretaker of the rising mobile OS. But Nokia has always been Symbian's biggest supporter. The company produced millions of phones running the OS, and the two have always had close ties. Together they dominated the cell phone market throughout the early 2000s; in fact, Symbian remained the until late 2010.
European cloud providers think the will result in more enterprises choosing local alternatives over the likes of Amazon Web Services and Rackspace, which, on the other hand, are adamant that they aren't taking part in programs such as Prism. The debate over U.S. access to cloud data that the Patriot Act helped fuel has once again become a hot topic in the wake of revelations about surveillance programs such as Prism, under which the U.S. government is said to have supplied by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, and Skype. "I think it will be really damaging for U.S. companies in terms of competing abroad. It is not something we have played up when marketing our services, but it is a fact that customers are going to discriminate," said Robert Jenkins, CEO at Swiss company CloudSigma. Generally, the news about Prism and other programs will have a big effect on people's confidence in using the Internet, according to Johan Christenson, CEO at City Network from Sweden.
Google Thursday announced the retirement of a four-year-old plug-in designed to let users of older version of Internet Explorer (IE) run Chrome's browser engine, declaring mission accomplished. Chrome Frame joins numerous other discontinued Google projects, including much higher-profile departures, like earlier this year. Support and updates for Frame will end in January 2014. Google portrayed Frame's retirement as a positive, saying it had done its job. "Today, most people are using modern browsers that support the majority of the latest Web technologies," said Chrome engineer Robert Shield in a post to the yesterday. "Better yet, the usage of legacy browsers is declining significantly and newer browsers stay up to date automatically, which means the leading edge has become mainstream."
Oracle is set to release a patch set for Java SE that targets 40 security vulnerabilities. Thirty-seven of the weaknesses can be exploited over a network without requiring an attacker to have a username or password, Oracle said. Affected products covered in the patch batch, which is set for release Tuesday, include Java SE as well as a number of version of JDK (Java Development Kit), JRE (Java Runtime Environment) and the JavaFX rich-client development platform, according to . Oracle is recommending that customers apply the patches as soon as possible "due to the threat posed by a successful attack."
How do you build a blockbuster app in Myanmar, one of Asia’s poorest countries? You go and ask a fortune teller for help, according to 25-year-old Htoo Myint Naung, a local developer. “There’s a very famous fortune teller in Yangon, he is called San Zamibo. We go and begged him to give up his contents,” he said. “We licensed it, and then made an app.” Htoo Myint Naung is just one of the young tech entrepreneurs in Myanmar, a country that is now after decades of military rule. Flooding in are investors from across the world, along with the prospect that foreign Internet firms might come in as well, and set up shop. But local developers like Htoo Myint Naung want their piece of the market too, and are doing so through their own local knowledge of the market.
Few people actually open and edit documents on their smartphones, let alone actually create them there. From a short-term perspective, then, placing a version of Microsoft Office on Apple's iPhone shouldn’t dramatically change the world. , ending months of speculation. The “free” Office Mobile for iPhone app only works with an Office 365 subscription, however, so users will have to pay to edit Office documents, whether it be an Office 365 subscription or Apple’s own $9.99 productivity apps, iWork. And, for now, Office Mobile is specifically formatted for the iPhone, so iPad users won’t be able to use it. Office Mobile for iPhone users will only be able to open and edit, not create, documents in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, although a Microsoft-supplied graphic shows the other standalone apps available for the iPhone: Lync, SharePoint, Yammer, and Skype. Outlook appears to be missing, although the Outlook.com app somewhat fills that hole. A dedicated SkyDrive app is also included, which appears to be the only option for cloud storage. That could be a real sticking point if Microsoft doesn't allow documents to be saved to iCloud or imported from there.
Siemens has started talks with private-equity firms about the sale of its share in Nokia Siemens Networks, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. The German company’s 50 percent share of Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) could be worth more than €7 billion ($9.3 billion) including debt. The news doesn’t come as a surprise to Gartner research director Sylvain Fabre, who in March wrote that Siemens would seek to finalize a deal this year. The timing of Siemens’ reported efforts are good, according to Fabre. NSN has gone through a major restructuring effort that saw it shed a number of units and lay off thousands of employees to focus on mobile broadband, and the company is now seeing the results of that work, he said. “NSN is in a very sexy state of growth, I guess, so now would be a good time to sell when the company is on a roll,” Fabre said Friday.
It’s here. Finally. Microsoft is now offering Office Mobile for iPhone. This is huge news for Microsoft Office, huge news for the iPhone, and a game changer for productivity on the go. Starting today, Office Mobile for iPhone is available in the Apple App Store, and it’s free for Office 365 subscribers. (. I’ve been screaming from the mountaintop for years that Microsoft should . Until now, Microsoft’s apparent strategy has been to use Microsoft Office as bait to lure customers to its Windows Phones and Windows tablets, but that tactic has failed. Instead of driving demand for Microsoft’s mobile devices, it just forced users to find compatible alternatives—Documents to Go, QuickOffice, and Apple's iWork apps— for the devices they want to use.
