Medienberichten unter Berufung auf interne Quellen zufolge erwartet HP im laufenden Jahr weniger als 30 Mio. Notebooks auszuliefern. Im Jahr 2012 waren es noch 32 Millionen Exemplare. Die anonymen Quellen sollen laut Digitimes angeblich direkt aus HPs eigenen Reihen stammen. Den Quellen folgend, seien es nächstes Jahr gerade mal 21 Mio. Stück, im darauffolgenden Jahr 2015 wahrscheinlich nur 19 Mio. ausgelieferte Notebooks.
Microsoft könnte schon bald einen Nachfolger für seinen Tablet-Computer Surface vorstellen. Der Softwarekonzern verschickte Einladungen für eine Surface-Veranstaltung am 23. September in New York. US-Medien spekulierten daraufhin, dass es sich wohl um die Präsentation der zweiten Generation des Surface handeln müsste.
Der US-Mischkonzern Koch Industries erwirbt für 7,2 Milliarden Dollar den US-Elektronikhersteller Molex, der unter anderem Apple beliefert. Mit dem Zukauf verbreitert Koch Industries, unter anderem Hersteller von Papierhandtüchern, Pappbechern und Lycra, sein Angebot.
Michael Dell scheint nun freie Bahn für den Rückkauf des von ihm gegründeten Computerherstellers zu haben. Der streitbare US-Investor Carl Icahn wird nach eigenen Worten keine weiteren Anstrengungen unternehmen, die Übernahme zu torpedieren.
Im Streit über sein Suchmaschinengeschäft will der US-Konzern Google der EU-Kommission weiter entgegenkommen. Auf diese Weise will Google einer Milliardenstrafe in der seit drei Jahren dauernden Auseinandersetzung entgehen.
Der europäische Fussball-Dachverband Uefa wird künftig die Lösung "Secutix 360°" der Lausanner Elca-Tochter Secutix SA für sein neues Ticketing- und Hospitality-Management-System nutzen.
Amerikanische Geheimdienste spähen einem Medienbericht zufolge den Datenverkehr zwischen internationalen Banken sowie mehrere Firmen aus. Betroffen seien unter anderem das Telekommunikationsnetzwerk für den Interbanken-Austausch (Swift), über das viele Finanztransaktionen weltweit abgewickelt werden, sowie die Firmennetzwerke von Google und dem staatlichen brasilianischen Ölkonzern Petrobras.
Die Schriftstellerin Juli Zeh (39) schlägt als Konsequenz aus der NSA-Spähaffäre ein neues Politik-Ressort vor. "Wir bräuchten dringend so eine Art Internet-Ministerium", sagte Zeh am Montag im Deutschlandfunk. "Es ist ja gar kein Ansprechpartner da." Die Autorin und Juristin hatte Ende Juli gemeinsam mit Autoren wie Ilija Trojanow oder Carolin Emcke einen offenen Brief an Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel (CDU) geschrieben.
Für einiges Aufsehen sorgte am Samstag ein Bericht der ehemals beim Wall-Street-Journal beschäftigten Journalistin Jessica Lessin: Demnach arbeite Amazon nicht nur an einem eigenen Smartphone, das Unternehmen suche auch nach Möglichkeiten, dieses kostenlos anzubieten.
Deutschlands Politiker bekommen neue abhörsichere Handys. Das Gerät mit der Bezeichnung „Simko 3“ auf Basis des Samsung Galaxy S3 absolvierte erfolgreich die Prüfung durch das deutsche Amt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI), wie die Deutsche Telekom heute mitteilte.
Yahoo has a new logo, but we think the company could have done better.
Seagate announced two new plans Monday to give consumers peace of mind when it comes to their hard drives: Seagate Rescue and Seagate Rescue and Replace. Traditionally, data recovery in the event of a hard-drive failure has been prohibitively expensive—potentially thousands of dollars per drive, due to the labor-intensive nature of the process. With more and more of our lives going digital, it can be hard to make the call between, say, losing thousands of vacation photos or paying thousands of dollars for just a at recovery. Seagate’s new plans are essentially hard-drive insurance, with data recovery included. Plans start at $30 for two years of Seagate Rescue, though the company also offers three- and four-year deals for $40 and $50, respectively. Seagate Rescue and Replace runs ten dollars more per price tier ($40 for two years, $50 for three, $60 for four) but, if your drive fails, you’ll also receive a replacement drive direct from the company.
If you buy Activision’s new Call of Duty game, you’ll also be lucky enough to receive a discount code for Eminem’s latest album.
Tech companies continue their push to reveal more details about how often the U.S. government collects user information for national security purposes. on Monday. Currently, tech firms are allowed to reveal aggregate statistics about government requests for user data. However, they are not allowed to break down how many of those requests are related to national security. All requests, whether they come from a city police department or from the NSA, are lumped together. program have alleged extensive data collection from major tech companies.
Japanese consumers will have to wait until February 2014 to purchase the new console. However, the PS4 will launch in North America, Europe, and South America in November.
After a long battle, Carl Icahn and associates admitted they were fighting a losing battle and have stepped away from their attempt to buy Dell. Icahn’s withdrawal leaves only a buyout offer from company CEO Michael Dell and associate Silver Lake Partners on the table, who have proposed a deal in which shareholders will get $13.75 per share and a special dividend of $0.13. Dell’s board has recommended shareholders back the Dell/Silver Lake offer and a final shareholder approval vote is set for Thursday. Icahn and shareholder Southeastern Asset Management had a buyout proposal that they believed was potentially worth $15.50 to $18 a share for current stockholders. In a withdrawal letter to Dell shareholders Monday, Icahn said he was fighting a losing battle and continued to believe the company was being undervalued. .
Verizon Communications should be able to block its broadband customers from going to websites that refuse to pay the provider to deliver their traffic, a lawyer for Verizon told an appeals court Monday. Current U.S. Federal Communications Commission rules prohibiting broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing web traffic go beyond the agency’s authority granted by the U.S. Congress in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Verizon lawyer Helgi Walker told judges in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Verizon is appealing FCC net neutrality rules . The net neutrality rules prevent Verizon from charging websites for bringing traffic to them, Walker told the three judges. “But for these rules, we could be pursuing those types of commercial arrangements,” she said. “My client wants freedom to explore that.” Congress did not give the FCC the authority to regulate broadband in the same way it regulates so-called common-carrier telephone networks, and the FCC itself had long stayed away from broadband regulation before passing the net neutrality rules, Walker said.
You might think at first glance that WiGig is better than Wi-Fi, and that given the choice between the two you’d obviously want the one with the word “gig” in the name. It sounds faster, because it is. However, WiGig has limitations that restrict it to more niche uses than traditional Wi-Fi. WiGig is the new brand established by the Wi-Fi alliance for the 802.11ad standard. It operates in the unlicensed 60GHz frequency range and promises data transmission rates up to 7Gbps. Real-world throughput will likely be slower, but theoretically—using different modulation and beam-forming techniques—WiGig could yield speeds of up to 25Gbps. That gives a whole new meaning to the term “blazing fast.” How fast is WiGig? —a company that manufactures 60GHZ chips used for WiGig—it can transfer 1000 photos between notebooks in five seconds. Uploading a two-minute HD video recording from a camcorder takes about a minute on a standard 802.11n Wi-Fi network, but would take a mere three seconds over WiGig. Downloading a 1080p HD movie would take three minutes instead of the hour it consumes over 802.11n. Of course, 802.11n is no longer the king of the hill for Wi-Fi networks. We now have the and is theoretically capable of gigabit-per-second transmission, but the real-world speed achieved from a single device is generally about half that (500Mbps).
Microsoft said Monday that it would provide early access to the release version of Windows 8 today, via its MSDN and TechNet services, reversing a previously-held stance that had angered developers. Microsoft's decision was revealed Monday in a , together with the disclosure that the Windows 8.1 bits would be accompanied by tools designed to spur app development. The current Windows 8.1 Enterprise RTM build will be available through MSDN and TechNet for businesses "later this month". Microsoft will make the Windows 8.1, Windows 8.1 Pro, and Window Server 2012 R2 builds available, Microsoft said. The Visual Studio 2013 Release Candidate is also live, Microsoft said, and can be . "We heard from you that our decision to not initially release Windows 8.1 or Windows Server 2012 R2 RTM bits was a big challenge for our developer partners as they’re readying new Windows 8.1 apps and for IT professionals who are preparing for Windows 8.1 deployments," Microsoft chief evangelist Steve Guggenheimer . "We’ve listened, we value your partnership, and we are adjusting based on your feedback. As we refine our delivery schedules for a more rapid release cadence, we are working on the best way to support early releases to the various audiences within our ecosystem.
European politicians on Monday called for the immediate suspension of a data-sharing agreement between the U.S. and the European Union following more revelations of spying by the U.S. National Security Agency. The Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP) provides the U.S. Treasury with data stored in Europe by the international bank transfer company Swift. However documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and reported by The Washington Post indicate the . The company is included in an NSA training manual for new agents on how to target private computer networks, according to the documents. “I think there is more than enough evidence to call for a suspension,” said Dutch Member of the European Parliament Sophie In’t Veld. “Formally, it is for the Commission to propose the suspension and then for the Council to decide. But we in Parliament can call for the suspension in the strongest terms.” German MEP Jan Philipp Albrecht agreed. “The revelations about NSA surveillance of Swift make a mockery of the E.U.’s agreement with the U.S. The NSA surveillance is an open breach of the agreement and further undermines the already insufficient data protection given to European citizens under the deal,” he said in a statement.
For this year’s annual update to PostgreSQL, the developers behind the open source database several new ways to communicate with other databases and data storage systems. PostgeSQL’s , which have been used since PostgreSQL 9.1 to read data from other systems, can now also be programmed to write data to non-PostgreSQL systems as well. Such two-way data exchanges could help developers write programs that fuse multiple sources of data, both the structured data that PostgreSQL holds as well as semi-structured data stored on NoSQL systems. For those who wish to bridge together two copies of the PostgreSQL itself, the development group has also released a federation driver that provides a speedier way to execute PostgreSQL-to-PostgreSQL data transactions.
SAP has unveiled a new version of its Business Objects BI (business intelligence) software suite that features support for more than 140 data sources and the promise of more stable deployments. Business Objects 4.1, which was announced Monday, follows the 2011 release of version 4.0. That product slipped well past its original release date, but even with the additional time, many users “It wasn’t where we wanted it to be,” said Jason Rose, vice president of BI product marketing, in an interview. But in the intervening period, SAP made “some significant changes” in the Business Objects development organization with a focus on improving quality and stability, he said. Along with a number of feature packs, those changes have helped increase customer satisfaction, Rose said.
Microsoft has begun sending out invitations for what is almost certainly a next-generation Surface launch, most likely what is being called the Surface 2. Interestingly, the launch is being held in New York City, not Silicon Valley or Redmond. Microsoft hasn't said too much about what the announcement will entail, but we understand that it will not include a small-form-factor Surface tablet. , a refreshed Surface with a fourth-generation Intel "Haswell" Core i5 processor as well as an additional 4GB of RAM, for a total of 8GB. Reports from Neowin and WinSuperSite have said that those are all that the new tablets supposedly offer, except for a new kickstand with not one, but two positions. Pricing and availability have not been announced. .
After promising to bring power-efficient Haswell processors to tablets, Intel is now shipping new low-power, fourth-generation Core i3 processors, including one that draws as little as 4.5 watts of power in specific usage scenarios. The dual-core Core i3-4012Y processor is part of a batch of new Haswell processors that could go into fanless tablets and laptop-tablet hybrids, bringing longer battery life to the devices. Tablets like Microsoft’s Surface Pro that run on Core processors offer great performance but poor battery life. Intel claims that, depending on usage, Haswell dual-core chips will offer up to 50 percent more battery life compared to previous Core chips, code-named Ivy Bridge. Intel also claims Haswell chips also offer better multimedia performance, but the quality of graphics on the 4.5-watt chip may not be comparable to the more power-hungry chips, which are capable of running more features. The Core i3-4012Y draws as little as 4.5 watts in specific tablet or mobile usage scenarios, according to Intel’s measurements. The measurement comes from what Intel calls SDP (Scenario Design Power), which tracks the usage of power when heat is dissipated in mobile usage scenarios.
The U.S. National Security Agency is able to read messages sent via a corporate BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), according to a report by German news magazine Der Spiegel. The purpose of this spying is economic or political, and not to counter terrorism, the magazine hints. The report, published in English on Monday, cites internal documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Governments have long demanded that BlackBerry provide access to encrypted messages carried by its email and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) services, to allow them to monitor for terrorist activity. BlackBerry has complied in the case of its consumer-grade BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS), notably to consumer messages. Indeed, Der Spiegel cited NSA documents claiming that since 2009, analysts have been able to see and read text messages sent from BlackBerrys, and to collect and process BIS mails.
Facebook aims to compete with Twitter as a source of real-time news around current events.
. Enter Aereo. . With Aereo, you can stream local broadcast stations such as FOX and CBS to your Internet-equipped devices in real-time, and the $8 monthly fee includes DVR capabilities and a channel guide. The vast majority of NFL games (and more than a few NHL, NBA, and MLB games) air on channels broadcast over the open air, making Aereo a potential cornerstone to the cord cutting strategy, or at least a low-cost way to catch live football on your mobile devices.
Because many enterprises have already upgraded their networks to the 802.11n standard, sales growth in the enterprise wireless LAN sector was cut in half during the second quarter, according to Infonetics Research. Global wireless LAN (WLAN) equipment revenue increased by 14 percent year-on-year in the second quarter, compared to a jump of almost 30 percent year-on-year during the same period last year, according to Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst at Infonetics. Still, equipment for WLANs remains the fastest growing network segment, he said. The major event this quarter was initial shipments of enterprise class access points based on 802.11ac—which is the latest standard for WLANs and promises increased speeds, network reliability and the ability to handle more users. But the impact of 802.11ac on overall sales will be minor this year because many enterprises have just upgraded to 802.11n, Machowinski said. Wireless industry expert Roger Hockaday agreed:
Intel will launch a new family of SSDs at this week’s Intel Developer Forum, offering security and remote management features for enterprise and small-business client devices. The Professional family will slot in between SSDs (solid-state disks) for data centers and for consumer devices. The first shipping product in the line, the Pro 1500 Series, will come in form factors including M.2 and 2.5-inch and in capacities as high as 480GB. It’s intended for thin and light Ultrabooks, 2-in-1 laptop-tablet systems and traditional PCs. The Pro line is designed for easy deployment and manageability, to reduce employee downtime and an enterprise’s total cost of ownership. Its security features are intended to help protect companies from the danger of data theft from lost or stolen devices. When it introduces the Pro line, Intel will also unveil the first SSD in that line, the Intel SSD Pro 1500 Series. Manufactured using a 20-nanometer process, the 1500 Series will use an LSI SandForce controller.
Western Digital is continuing its acquisition spree of flash storage companies, announcing a definitive agreement to buy enterprise solid-state drive (SSD) vendor Virident for $685 million. Virident’s operations will be integrated into WD’s HGST (previously called Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) subsidiary, which was acquired from Hitachi. Virident is best known for its FlashMax range of products, which include SSDs that can function as server-side memory or long-term storage, and also related software that can manage SSD storage resources in data centers. WD is well-known for its hard drive offerings, but has been on an acquisition spree as it expands into the SSD market. Earlier this year, WD invested $51 million in Skyera, which develops energy-efficient storage systems with SSDs, and also acquired Velobit, which makes SSD optimization software, for an undisclosed amount. The company in July acquired SSD maker STEC for $340 million. WD also offers its own SSDs and has also announced consumer-grade solid-state hybrid drives that combine hard drives and SSDs.
In perhaps China’s toughest push to crack down on online defamation, authorities have unveiled measures that could send Internet users to jail for up to three years if found guilty of posting slanderous rumors. The measures were announced on Monday as part of a judicial interpretation of Chinese law. The measures were established by China’s Supreme Court and its top prosecution agency, which spent more than a year studying the subject. “In recent years, illegal activities that have used the Internet to commit crimes have increased daily,” said Supreme Court spokesman Sun Jungong in a televised press conference. “In particular, has been the prominent use of the Internet to commit crimes of defamation.” Under the new measures, Internet users can face defamation charges if their online posts have received over 5,000 views or been re-posted over 500 times. They can also be charged if their online statements caused self-harm or suicide to the victim.
What is it with software developers making user-interface (UI) changes that serve no purpose other than to confuse users? iTunes is perhaps the worst offender in this department--I think the current version (11) is perhaps the most unusable piece of software to date--but Google is giving it a run for the money with Chrome. . , now there's just a little double-arrow I have to click in order to see a drop-down list of those extensions.
The photo-sharing app has to translate its growth into profit, so get ready to see some ads in the next year.
But the big question is: Why?
After a hot rumor blazed about a free Kindle phone being released in 2013, Amazon moved quickly to douse the flames/
A Chinese journalist who was jailed because of incriminating email records provided by Yahoo has been freed by local authorities after serving over eight years in prison. on Saturday. It is unclear why he was released early. He was arrested in 2004 after sending out an email that detailed upcoming Chinese government restrictions on the local media in the run up to the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. The email was sent using a Yahoo Mail account, and its information was posted anonymously on a website based in New York focused on promoting democracy in China. Yahoo agreed to give up Shi’s email account information to Chinese authorities, who were tracking the source of the information. It resulted in Shi receiving a 10-year prison sentence for leaking state secrets.