Das Wachstum bei Apple kommt zum Erliegen. Der Umsatz stagniert, der Gewinn schrumpft. Auch die Zahl der verkauften Mac-Computer ist zurückgegangen. Apple-Chef Cook hat neue Produkte angekündigt.
Die Uno warnt: Ein einziges Hacker-SMS genügt und aufs Mobiltelefon kann zugegriffen werden. Betroffen sind alle Arten von Handys. Schweizer SIM-Karten sind aber sicher.
Al Lowe ist der Erfinder von «Leisure Suit Larry». Im zweiten Teil des Porträts erfahren Sie, wie Lowe aus Frust Frührentner wurde, ihn sein geistiges Kind aber dennoch nie losliess.
Im Land der unbegrenzten Möglichkeiten wehren sich immer mehr Menschen gegen die staatliche Bespitzelung. Eine wichtige Anlaufstelle ist dabei prism-break.org
Sie wollen den schnellsten Gamer-PC der Schweiz? Wir haben ihn. Die von PCP.ch gebaute Höllenmaschine kann jetzt auf 20 Minuten ersteigert werden - für einen guten Zweck.
Britische Internet-Nutzer müssen künftig aktiv entscheiden, ob sie über ihren Anschluss auf Pornos zugreifen können. Wer nichts unternimmt, dem installiert der Provider automatisch einen Filter.
Wegen technischer Probleme hat sich die Auslieferung von Nvidias Spielkonsole Shield verzögert. Nun nennt der Hersteller Nvidia einen neuen Termin - für die USA und Kanada.
Apples Internet-Plattform für externe Software-Entwickler ist attackiert worden. Angeblich haben Unbekannte versucht, sensible Daten zu stehlen. Die Seite ist seit Tagen gesperrt.
Al Lowe hat die dauergeile Game-Figur «Leisure Suit Larry» erfunden. Im ersten Teil unseres Porträts erfahren Sie, wie aus dem Musiklehrer aus der Provinz ein Kult-Game-Entwickler wurde.
Elegant, schnell und sicher: Das Q10 ist nach einer langen Durststrecke ein von A bis Z gelungenes Blackberry. Im Test verraten wir, für wen sich der Wechsel zur Brombeere lohnt.
Wenn User aufgefordert werden, bei einer Werbekampagne mitzumachen, kann das auch nach hinten losgehen. Oder möchten Sie gerne eine Coke mit Bazillen trinken?
Der Tod einer jungen Chinesin ist offenbar nicht auf Apple-Hardware zurückzuführen, sondern auf ein gefälschtes Ladekabel. Und bereits sorgt ein weiterer Unfall für Aufsehen.
Google und Apple dominieren mit Android und iOS den Smartphone-Markt. Dahinter balgen sich Microsoft und Blackberry um den letzten Platz auf dem Podest. Nun zeichnet sich der Sieger ab.
Eine Schweizerin erlitt Anfang Juli schwere Verbrennungen - ihr Galaxy-Smartphone war explodiert. Nun ist klar: Die Batterie war schuld. Der Hersteller empfiehlt, nur Originalteile zu benutzen.
Windows tablets hold within them an implicit promise: To deliver the full Windows 8 experience in a svelte tablet form factor. Unfortunately, the ambitions of Microsoft and its partners have thus far exceeded reality, largely due to processor power issues. Even the lowest of low-wattage Ultrabook chips simply sip too much juice, forcing manufacturers to house their hybrids in cases full of fans—a compromise that has left Windows tablets and convertibles thicker and than the ARM-based tablet competition. No more. Intel announced Tuesday that new Core Y-series Haswell processors capable of fitting in thin, completely fanless designs are inbound “in the coming months.” While Intel had previously announced its Core Y-series chips would run at a scenario design point—basically, an Intel metric for the power draw during sustained workloads—of 6 watts, the newly announced processors will dip all the way down to 4.5W SDP. (6W variants will also be available.) That 1.5-watt difference between the two is the difference between needing additional cooling and a potentially fanless design, according to Intel.
Intel says it will increase the battery life of tablets and hybrid PCs that use its microprocessors, with new low-power Haswell chips that will start shipping later this year. The chip maker said Tuesday that its upcoming Core Y series chips will run at 4.5-watts using a metric called SDP (scenario design power), which measures the power used to dissipate heat while running certain apps on mobile and touch devices. That’s a lower figure than Intel was aiming for initially, Intel spokesman Dan Snyder said via email. Intel previously said it would release Core Y chips with a 6-watt SDP.
LinkedIn is giving companies the ability to place their marketing content into users’ feeds, in a move that expands the site’s revenue opportunities. LinkedIn, which is traditionally known as a social networking site for professionals, has been testing the program over the past six months with companies like Nissan, Xerox and Adobe. The so-called sponsored updates will be available starting Tuesday to customers who have an account representative and will become available to any business with a company page by the end of the month, said David Hahn, vice president of product management at LinkedIn, in a Tuesday . The marketing content will be visible on desktop PCs as well as on smartphones and tablet devices, and will clearly be marked “sponsored,” appearing in the member’s homepage feed along with organic posts from their network and the companies that they already follow, Hahn said.
You can’t shop anywhere without running into a legion of Redboxes. Now it looks like the cardinal-colored entertainment kiosks are keen to transfer their physical omnipresence over to the digital world. After shoring up its presence on iOS, Windows Phone, and Android (including the forked Kindle Fire tablet), an official Redbox app has just touched down in the Windows Store. Redbox lovers will find a lot to like, though there’s nothing groundbreaking here. In addition to the Most Popular, Coming Soon, and Newly Released lists of movies you’d expect to find in an app like this, the Redbox app can tap into your device’s location to pinpoint kiosks near you, using Windows 8’s baked-in Bing Maps as a backbone. Not sure where a particular kiosk is located relative to you? The app can even provide directions. Once you select a specific Redbox location, you’re able to search the games and movies available in that particular kiosk. (Pro tip: Right-click on the main screen to bring up a bar with Movies, Games, and Featured tabs at the top of the screen.)
A fast, reliable Internet connection is imperative for most small and medium businesses. A new study from Akamai suggests that the Internet is getting faster overall, but just how fast varies from one country to the next—or even between different regions within a country. Akamai gathers data from customers around the world, and analyzes it through its Intelligent Platform analysis tool to produce the quarterly State of the Internet report. The data from the first quarter of 2013 shows a four percent increase in the average global connection speed. place overall this quarter. That makes the United States about 40 percent slower than the first place nation—South Korea—and leaves the US behind Latvia and the Czech Republic. (SBA) study on the impact of broadband speed and price on small business found that an average business in a metropolitan area spends $115 per month for Internet access, while an average business in a rural area spend $93 per month. The catch for rural businesses is that they’re getting significantly slower Internet speeds for the money.
Flipboard magazines have arrived on the Web. You can now publicly share with the entire online world any content you’ve turned into a digital magazine, even if the reader doesn’t have a Flipboard account. The new feature is a continuation of the popular reading that began in March when Flipboard 2.0 first introduced user-curated magazines to the service. Flipboard magazines are exactly what they sound like. Users organize articles based on a theme such as surfing, sharks, Sherlock Holmes, or immigration reform into a single collection. Articles are added individually from around the Web using an applet installed in your browser’s toolbar, or from articles found using Flipboard’s mobile apps.
claims that the tech is installed on 1.1 billion PCs and more than 3 billion mobile phones, along with each and every Blu-ray player known to man. , a company that offers a remote troubleshooting tool for PCs and iOS devices, Java is directly responsible for a whopping 40 percent of its users’ installations of the uber-annoying Ask.com toolbar. Java, the procedure prompts you to both install the Ask toolbar and switch your browser’s default search engine to Ask.com, which is stuffed with ads and far less useful than Google or Bing. Worse, the Ask toolbar option is enabled by default when you’re installing or updating Java—you have to actively uncheck the boxes to prevent your computer from filling up with Ask’s sneakware.
Many companies claim to have the solution for email overload, but few deliver. That's why I was wary of Mailstrom, a (currently) free service that promises to deliver the elusive "inbox zero"—a state of being so far out of my reach, I'm not even sure what it means. But after testing Mailstrom, I was pleasantly surprised at just how close I came to achieving that sought-after state.
. Today let's look at another new feature, one that's just starting to roll out to users: a full-screen new-message window. button, you get a window that appears in the right corner of the screen. Now there's a new option. In the top-right corner of that Compose window, you'll see three icons: Minimize, Full-screen, and Close. Clicking that middle one enlarges the window, though the description "full-screen" is a little disingenuous here: you actually get a larger, centered window that darkens the background. At least, that's how it appears on my system, which runs at 1,920 x 1,080. If you have a lower-resolution screen, the window may indeed seem closer to full-screen. (Anyone running, say, a 1,366 x 768 display? Hit the comments and let your fellow readers know if the window really is "full-screen," or still just bigger and centered.)
with a new feature that lets you use the search giant’s Cloud Print service from any Windows application capable of, well, printing. . The new feature is a handy addition if you want to print a file directly from Microsoft Excel to a remote printer. Previously, Google Cloud Print worked by letting you send a file to your Cloud-connected printers from Chrome for the desktop, smartphones, and tablets. Now, you can access the service from any desktop application, such as Microsoft Office or Adobe Reader. and install the EXE file like you would for any other application. After that’s done, you’ll see an option for Google Cloud Printer show up in your print options across the desktop. Google Cloud Printer will also show up as an option in modern UI applications able to print, but in my tests cloud printing from the touchy-feely side of Windows always failed.
Removing mobile phone roaming charges in the European Union may prove more expensive for customers in the long run, a telecoms expert has warned. E.U. Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes proposes doing away with roaming charges, with legislation due to be presented in September. Although consumer groups have cautiously welcomed the idea, she has faced huge opposition from the telecommunications industry. Paul Reynolds, director of the Competition Economists Group, on Tuesday said that removing roaming charges may not even be great news for customers. CEG economists provide economic and financial advice on competition and regulation. "Removing the difference between roaming and domestic call charges does not simply mean that roaming charges will disappear, we may see domestic prices go up," he said. "So although customers who roam a lot may get better value, others could well see their bills increase."
An independent security researcher claimed responsibility for the security breach incident that forced Apple to close down its Developer Center website last week. Ibrahim Balic claims that he reported the vulnerability to Apple and didn’t act with any malicious intentions, but he confirmed extracting user IDs, names and email addresses from the website. On Sunday, Apple announced that and attempted to download the personal information of users registered on the site. The site had been offline since Thursday. “Sensitive personal information was encrypted and cannot be accessed, however, we have not been able to rule out the possibility that some developers’ names, mailing addresses, and/or email addresses may have been accessed,” the company said in a message posted on the site’s homepage.
suite now comes with a sidebar, from which users can launch their favorite tools. “Over the years we saw the increased use of widescreen monitors, so we had to rethink how we used the user interface,” said Rob Weir, of the Apache OpenOffice Project Management Committee. The OpenOffice sidebar tackles the age-old problem of how to make a large number of its features easily available. As desktop applications tend to accrue more and more features, the sheer number of feature controls can be problematic in that users may have to hunt around to find them, if they are not available. Or users could become overwhelmed by all the new options, if they are all displayed at once.
A new privacy tool called MaskMe may help people evade data harvesting efforts by websites and marketers. Many of the components of , created by the privacy software developer Abine, are individually available elsewhere. But Abine has meshed them together into a convenient extension for the Chrome and Firefox browsers. MaskMe comes in a free and premium version. The free version lets users generate a unique alias email address that users can give to, for example, an e-commerce website if they fear they will receive too many messages later. MaskMe forwards email from the alias address to a person's regular account. Users can shut off the forwarding if they get annoyed with a particular sender.
Cisco has made many other security-related acquisitions in recent years. Overall, the company is looking to build out a security services platform architecture that provides a common, aggregated set of tools, said Christopher Young senior vice president, security group, during a conference call Tuesday. In the past, "you had a point [security] product for everything you could think about," he said. "This is no longer a market where point product leadership is going to win out." Today, "the [security] perimeter is vanishing to encompass the mobile network and the cloud," as well as other endpoints that "in many cases, the IT department no longer controls," Young said. "When this is described as a war, it's not an over-exaggeration." Cisco was also attracted by the "vibrant open-source community" that has sprung up around Snort, the intrusion detection and prevention engine created by Sourcefire's founder and CTO, Martin Roesch, as well as Sourcefire's highly skilled team of vulnerability experts, Young said.
Patent firm Eolas Technologies lost an appeal against Google, J.C. Penney, Yahoo and Amazon.com in a long-drawn lawsuit involving key Web patents. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed without comment on Monday an order by a federal court in Texas, which had ruled in July last year that several claims relating to the two patents in the suit were invalid. including Adobe Systems, Google, Yahoo, Apple, eBay and Amazon.com of unlicensed use of its patents in websites and other products. a similar lawsuit.
. The update for Microsoft’s flagship server OS includes a number of features to improve and enhance managing virtual servers with Windows Server 2012. from a single box. Virtual servers allow businesses to maximize the value and productivity of their investment in hardware. With Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview, Microsoft has streamlined the performance of Hyper-V. Replication between virtual servers is faster, and more frequent, and Microsoft has added more disaster recovery options. The new Hyper-V also allows you to assign QoS (quality of service) to prioritize disk access for virtual machines that need it more, such as a database server. One of the best improvements in Windows Server 2012 R2, though, is the enhanced support for Linux virtual machines. Previous versions of Hyper-V have technically supported Linux, but the capabilities were very limited.
Salesforce.com will soon roll out the fourth version of its mobile Chatter application, an update that gives users of the collaboration software more ways to view, retrieve and write back data to the core CRM (customer relationship management) system. One key new feature will give Chatter mobile users the ability to edit Salesforce.com records, such as customer-service cases or sales leads, from their devices, rather than only being able to read such records. In addition, Salesforce.com dashboards a user might look at in the main CRM application will now also be available in Chatter mobile.
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group plans to enter the country's smart TV industry with a set-top box product for streamlining online shopping on big screen televisions. The set-top box runs a Linux-based OS and can stream television shows and movies, and play games and music via a remote control or a user's own smartphone. What sets the device apart from some rival products, though, is its focus on online shopping. Accessing Alibaba's shopping services through the box, registered users can buy the products they view in two steps: confirming they want the product, and paying for it, said Yu Ce, vice president for Alibaba Group. "This complete process will make the shopping very simple, and suitable for a large number of consumers, especially for older people, children, and people that use TVs," he said. Products sold on the TVs, however, won't be the same as those typically offered on Alibaba's online shopping sites Taobao Marketplace and Tmall. Instead, the set-top box will initially feature discount deals on products from Alibaba's group-buying site Juhuasuan.
You thought your PC was fine. It's not . And yet it still seems to wheeze as it boots up each morning, and applications take forever to launch. Your components could be to blame—hardware that's due for an upgrade. Setting up a speedier system could be as simple as updating your USB ports with an external dock, or you could step up to speedier storage. Read on to find out how you can make your PC more productive. A USB-based docking station is an excellent way to quickly expand the number of peripherals that you can add using a single port. Other typical capabilities in a full-featured dock include audio ports and an ethernet port, as well as additional USB ports. Be sure to go for a dock that works with USB 3.0, which is far speedier than USB 2.0. More advanced docks may also incorporate technology to power one or two external monitors via USB, greatly simplifying things if you'd like to set up a multimonitor rig. (Check out our on how to take advantage of multiple displays.)
Never mind all the stories about unemployment. American businesses are still clamoring for workers. They just may not need them for a full 40-hour week. ”Temps” have long been the go-to solution for businesses that need extra hands during busy production cycles or for special projects. In the old days, when you needed , you had one real option: The temp agency. Temporary staffing agencies—which are still around, mind you—might specialize in administrative workers (to handle that filing project that no one else wanted to touch) or hook you up with programmers or project managers (for more complicated, but temporary, projects). Either way, the relationship was generally between you (the employer) and the temp agency. You often had limited control over who came to work on Monday morning and even less over how much they got paid. The agency controlled the relationship, taking the employee’s fee and excising a healthy cut before passing the remainder on to the worker as a salary. This system worked for years. Many temps were happy to bounce from job to job, much like substitute teachers, waiting for the call as to where they’d report the following day for work. And many temp agencies treated their workers as regular employees, withholding taxes and sometimes even offering benefits. But that model isn’t proving sustainable. The deep cuts temp agencies take—up to half of a worker’s take-home pay—means most temps can’t make much of a living with irregular work. Meanwhile, employers are increasingly on the hunt for deeply qualified individuals with specialized skills. Those individuals may be located anywhere in the world—and willing to work for much less than previously imagined.
Emerging technologies for 4G LTE networks are expected to make rapid advances over the next few years, helping mobile networks keep up with data growth and bringing more users worldwide into the LTE fold. By 2018, a majority of the world’s LTE subscriptions will be on networks that use either TD (time-division) LTE or features from the emerging LTE-Advanced standard, according to an ABI Research forecast released on Monday. At the same time that mobile operators are still expanding infrastructure based on FD (frequency-division) LTE, the earliest version of the high-speed mobile system, the two more recent technologies are fast making inroads, according to ABI analyst Nick Marshall. They may dominate networks of large, outdoor “macro” cells by 2015, Marshall said. TD-LTE uses one band of frequencies to send traffic both downstream and upstream, while FD-LTE uses separate, equal-size bands for the two directions. TD-LTE makes LTE possible in countries that license so-called unpaired spectrum. It also lets operators dedicate more capacity to downstream traffic, such as Web and video content, than to upstream traffic such as photo uploads.
Network Solutions warned on Monday of latency problems for customers using MySQL databases just a week after the hosting company fended off distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. "Some hosting customers using MySQL are reporting issues with the speed with which their websites are resolving," the company wrote on Facebook. "Some sites are loading slowly; others are not resolving. We're aware of the issue, and our technology team is working on it now." Network Solutions, which is owned by Web.com, registers domain names, offers hosting services, sells SSL certificates and provides other website-related administration services. two days later.
Mickie Rosen, head of global media at Yahoo, who was responsible for properties including Yahoo News, Sports and Finance, is leaving the company effective Sept. 1, Yahoo revealed Monday in a regulatory filing. . However, the two events are believed to be unrelated. The board members’ resignations were disclosed alongside Yahoo’s announcement of its repurchase of 40 million shares of Yahoo common stock owned by hedge fund Third Point, at a purchase price of US$29.11 per share. Loeb is CEO at Third Point; the hedge fund had nominated Wilson and Wolf as Yahoo board members.
Intel has updated its road map with a new, low-power server chip to help it ward off competition from Calxeda and other makers of low-power chips. The new chip will be based on Broadwell, a microarchitecture to be introduced next year as the successor to Intel’s Haswell design. But this processor will be a system-on-chip, setting it apart from Intel’s other Xeon server products. SOCs combine several components onto a single chip to reduce power consumption and space requirements. In the server market, they’re often used in micro-servers, a type of low-power server used for large-scale, online workloads.
For years, Intel and other chip makers designed processors like stock engines, dropping them into PCs, notebooks, and servers. Now, Intel has shown a newfound willingness to mod custom silicon for server customers, tweaking them with hardware and software accelerators to improve their performance. These same servers are the ones powering cloud applications that include email and storage, but also interpret the gestures and spoken commands of smartphone users. On Monday, for example, Intel and Nuance Communications disclosed that Intel is developing an accelerator to improve Nuance’s voice recognition, which powers as many as 6 billion connected devices, according to Sean Brown, Nuance’s senior manager of innovation. Intel has also developed custom chips for both eBay and Facebook, said Jason Waxman, general manager of Intel’s data center group, at an Intel datacenter event on Monday.
If you’ve ever engaged in a voice over IP (VoIP) phone call or conducted a video conference over the Web, you’ve probably experienced choppy audio, pixelated video, and other “hiccups” that make these technologies frustrating to use at best and and an impediment to doing business at worst. Those annoying interruptions are the result of data struggling to get across your network. It’s important for all of the data to get from Point A to Point B, but some types—like streaming voice and video—simply won’t work if the data can’t travel smoothly. You can solve the problem by spending a lot of money for a bigger, faster Internet connection, but the smart way to address the issue is with QoS: Quality of Service. QoS manages network traffic, and prioritizes certain types of data over others to ensure consistent network quality. It is generally managed at the network router or switch, to direct network traffic appropriately. Data traveling across the Internet is a lot like vehicles driving across town. If five cars leave a building to drive to a restaurant, there’s a mesh of roads in all directions, and there are multiple potential paths to take. Each vehicle could take an entirely different route, and the car that left first might arrive at the destination last.
. A German cryptographer named Karsten Nohl will be presenting findings to that effect at the annual Black Hat computer security conference at the end of the month. worldwide would currently be vulnerable to this type of attack. Fixes are already in the works, but as any IT manager who's survived an old-fashioned Windows virus onslaught knows, a fix does not necessarily equal a solution. Even if patches are made available, that's no guarantee they'll be universally rolled out in a timely fashion. SIM cards can be updated invisibly over the air by network operators, but that poses a secondary problem. Because users have no visibility into whether their phones are vulnerable to the attack or not, wireless customers won't know whether or not their devices are safe. For individuals, the risk of someone hijacking your phone and listening in on calls or making phony purchases is bad enough.
uneasy. What matters on Wall Street, however, isn’t the same as what matters on Main Street, so small and medium businesses need to analyze the news through a different lens. Microsoft actually had a decent quarter to cap off a very successful fiscal 2013. Revenue for Q4 was up 10 percent over Q4 2012, and profit was almost $5 billion (USD) compared to a $492 million loss in the same quarter last year. Revenue was also up for the year, and Microsoft profit was nearly 30 percent higher than 2012. Despite declining PC sales, adoption of Windows 8 is on pace with that of its predecessor. There has been some backlash over the dramatic redesign of Windows 8, and Microsoft’s attempt to convert the OS to a touch-based interface, but most of the major complaints are addressed with the Windows 8.1 update, which will be officially available later this year. for Microsoft.