Category: News

Windows 10 may be a fail

Posted on January 26, 2015 by - News

windows-10-technical-preview-turquoiseTaiwanese suppliers of notebooks are not over impressed by the news last week that Microsoft will give free upgrades to its Windows 10 operating system.
Digitimes, which regularly talks to manufacturers in the supply chain, reports that Microsoft’s move is unlikely to prompt people to replace their existing notebooks.
Windows 10 is not expected to be available until the third quarter of this year – and the supply chain doesn’t think a free upgrade from Windows 8.1 or Windows 7 is much of an incentive for people to go out and buy new machines.
The report claims that many people continue to use Windows 7 and as much as 10 percent of people are still using the now unsupported Windows XP.
People prefer to buy new smartphones or tablets than expensive notebook PCs, Digitimes said.
Notebook sales will continue to be of low end models rather than the full monte with bells and whistles, Digitimes said.

 

Patch that Flash!

Posted on January 23, 2015 by - News

wargames-hackerSoftware company Adobe released a security bulletin that patches its Flash Player.
The updates apply to Windows, to the Macintosh, and to the Linux operating system.
The security bulletin said that Adobe is aware of an exploit used in attacks against older versions of the Flash player.
Affected software includes the Flash Player Desktop Runtime, Flash Player for Linux, Flash Player for Google Chrome, and Flash Player for Internet Explorer 10 and Internet Explorer 11.
You can find details of what you need to do by going to this page. The patch itself won’t be available until next week, it seems.

Apple iWatch runs out of time

Posted on January 23, 2015 by - News

fobwatchA report claimed that Apple watches, which will launch in the first half of this year, will only have battery lives of about three and a half hours.
According to 9to5Mac, it has spoken to people familiar with the product who said the chip and the screen will drag its battery life down to a minimum.
Once the watch runs down, you’ll have to find a power socket to recharge it.
The magazine said that Apple decided to use an S1 chip and a top notch screen for the watch, resulting in “significant” power drain.
Apple watches are already in production in the Far East.
9to5mac claimed that Apple wanted to launch the watch last year, but worries over the battery life meant it decided to wait.
Prices for the watch are expected to start at around $350.

 

US rules China, Taiwan dumping solar panels

Posted on January 23, 2015 by - News

solarsTrade protection organisation the US International Trade Commission (ITC) has confirmed that Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturers of photo voltaic products are dumping them.
Both anti-dumping and countervailing duties will be levied on imports to the USA from China, while anti-dumping tariffs will be imposed on product from Taiwan.
According to market intelligence firm Trendforce, Chinese PV models will face swingeing minimum tariff of 70 percent.
Taiwanese manufacturers get off much more lightly, with rates in between 12 to 27 percent.
The US ITC acts to prevent home grown manufacturers from being penalised when supplies exceed demand.
Trendforce said that solar cell firms in Taiwan are operating zero margins.
Some Chinese vendors have already relocated their PV manufacturing facilities, and that’s something Taiwanese firms will have to do a similar thing in order to stay afloat.

Hutchison to buy O2

Posted on January 23, 2015 by - News

PhoneConsolidation in the UK mobile industry is certain after Hutchison Whampoa said it will buy O2 for £10.25 billion.
O2 is currently owned by Spanish telco Telefonica.
Hutchison already owns the UK Three network.
O2 is the second biggest mobile operator in the UK, with around 22 million subscribers.
Just a few weeks ago we reported that BT entered talks with EE, with a view to acquiring it.
BT then ruled out buying O2. It is still in talks with EE over acquiring that business, with a view to becoming a dominant player in the UK market.
Hutchison more or less started off the mobile phone business in the UK with the launch of Orange.

 

Apple CEO gets wage rise

Posted on January 23, 2015 by - News

Apple's Tim CookThe CEO of Apple’s salary rose by 43 percent last year, the company said.
Tim Cook, a Brit, now only earns $2 million a year, up from a measly $1.4 million before his salary was raised in February 2014.
If you count Cook’s total remuneration it amounts to $9.2 million a year.
Apple also raised other executives’ salary by over 14 percent, the company said.
The executives got their wage increased because Apple compared their salaries to other peoples’ salaries in comparable industries.
If executives at Apple hit their targets, they can earn bonuses worth ip to 400 percent of their salary.
Cook is judged by the company to have hit his targets since he became CEO in August 2011.

 

Solid state drive prices to topple

Posted on January 23, 2015 by - News

ssdVolumes of scale mean the prices of solid state drives (SSDs) are set to fall.
Digitimes, quoting the technology manager of memory company Apacer, is estimating that prices for, example, of 256GB SSDs will tumble to as little as $70 in the second half of this year.
And a 128GB SSD could cost as little as $40 by year end, according to manager CK Chang.
He reckons that the price drops could well stimulate a far greater demand for the storage devices.
One of the reasons the prices are falling is because process technologies for the type of NAND flash memory used is migrating to 14 nanometre, 16 nanometre or 16 nanometre processes.
That means manufacturers get more NAND memory from a single silicon wafer.

 

Speed limits of quantum computing found

Posted on January 23, 2015 by - News

Swiss Watches the BrandScientists at the University of California, Berkeley, claim to have proved a relationship between energy and time that lets people calculate the “quantum speed limit”.
The scientists said that while the energy-time uncertainty relationship is the flip side of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
K Birgitta Whaley, director of the Quantum Unit at Berkeley, said: “This is the first time the energy-time uncertainty principle has been put on a rigorous basis – our arguments don’t appeal to experiment but come directly from the structure of quantum mechanics.”
She said the derivations has  implications for any measurement involving time, and certainly does for quantum computing.
Graduate student Ty Volkoff, said the uncertainty principle limits how precise your clocks can be. “In a quantum computer, it limits how fast you can go from one state to the other, so it puts limits on the clock speed of your computer.”

Sky to auto-block web pornography

Posted on January 22, 2015 by - News

David CameronBroadband supplied by Sky will automatically stop customers from seeing pornography unless people actively opt out.
In a letter to its customers, it said that the Broadband Shield feature will be automatically enabled, unless people choose to change the settings.
Sky is the first broadband company in the UK to implement the policy.
UK prime minister David Cameron said two years ago he wanted mandatory online filtering of web sites to protect children.
Director of Sky Lyssa McGowan said the internet isn’t universally suitable for children.
In a blog on the Sky site, she wrote that it’s acting in the interests of security and online safety.
When dodgy sites are encountered by customers, a message will flash up on the screen and people will only be able to unblock specific pages by logging in and changing their settings.

 

Blackberry recruits politicos for market share

Posted on January 22, 2015 by - News

Samsung Browses BlackberryBlackberry is fighting back against its competitors by asking politicians to step into the apps business.
The company’s CEO John Chen has written to members of the US Congress and is trying to persuade them to force competitors to make their apps available for his company’s own products.
The Canadian company has made its unusual appeal under the banner of net neutrality – a contentious matter in the United States.
Chen wants the politicians to force firms using Apple or Android operations to make their services available to Blackberry users.
Chen believes that the dominance of Apple and Samsung in the mobile market “has created a two tiered wireless broadband” system.
People using iPhones or Android devices can access more content than people using other operating systems, Chen claimed.
“These are precisely the sort of discriminatory practices that neutrality advocates have criticised at the carrier level,” he wrote on his company’s blog.

 

Dell, HP fight back on server prices

Posted on January 22, 2015 by - News

server-racksA price war has developed on the server front after multinationals faced competition from original design manufacturers (ODMs) that make the machines.
Over the last year or so, companies such as Quanta Computer have undercut Dell and HP and won big orders from the likes of Google and Amazon.
Digitimes reports that HP is fighting back by striking a deal with giant Taiwanese combo Foxconn to offer cut price X86 servers to customers.
Meanwhile, Dell has struck a deal with Microsoft to offer cloud based systems in a bid to sell private cloud data centres.
But while the news might be good for enterprises looking to pay less for their X86 servers, it can’t be good news for margins.
And Intel, which supplies the majority of microprocessors that power servers, must be worrying about an effect it may have on its margins.

 

Intelligent keyboard invented

Posted on January 22, 2015 by - News

Screen Shot 2015-01-22 at 14.42.37Scientists at Georgia Tech claim to have come up with an “intelligent” keyboard they believe will change the face of computing.
The self powered non-mechanical keyboard, they say, will give better security.
It generates electricity when a person’s fingertips contact the multi-layer materials that make up the device.
Zhong Lin Wang, a professor at Georgia Tech, said: “Every punch of the keys produces a complex electrical signal that can be recorded and analysed.”
The scientists believe the keyboard can also generate enough juice to charge portable devices or to turn a keyboard into a wireless keyboard.
Wang said: “This has the potential to be a new means for identifying users.  With this system, a compromised password would not allow a cyber criminal onto the computer. The way each person types even a few words is individual and unique.”

 

Oracle pushes out huge security update

Posted on January 22, 2015 by - News

Sisyphus-Image-01CDatabase outfit Oracle has pushed out a record number of patches in a security update.

Included in the patch are critical fixes for Java SE and the Oracle Sun Systems Products Suite.

All up this means that the update contains nearly 170 new security vulnerability fixes, including 36 for Oracle Fusion Middleware. Twenty-eight of these may be remotely exploitable without authentication and can possibly be exploited over a network without the need for a username and password.

The worst of the bugs are in Java SE, Fujitsu M10-1, M10-4 and M10-4S. In the case of Java SE, a CVSS Base Score of 10.0 was reported for four distinct client-only vulnerabilities.

Writing in the company blog, Oracle said that out of these 19 Java vulnerabilities, 15 affect client-only installations, two affect client and server installations, and two affect JSSE installations.

The blog says that the lower number of Oracle Java SE fixes reflect the results of Oracle’s strategy for addressing security bugs affecting Java clients and improving security development practices in the Java development organization.

While that might be true, the ton of patches in the rest of the software suggests that while Java is being closely watched, other bits are not.

In the case of the Oracle Sun Systems Products Suite, CVE-2013-4784 has a CVSS rating of 10.0 and affects XCP Firmware versions prior to XCP 2232. Overall, there are 29 security fixes for the suite.

The update also includes eight new security fixes for Oracle Database Server, none of which are remotely exploitable without authentication. Oracle MySQL has nine security fixes.

There are also: 10 fixes for Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control; 10 for Oracle E-Business Suite; six for the Oracle Supply Chain Products Suite; seven security fixes for Oracle PeopleSoft products; 17 for Oracle Siebel CRM; one for Oracle JD Edwards Products; two for Oracle iLearning; two for Oracle Communications Applications; one for Oracle Retail Applications; one for Oracle Health Sciences Applications and 11 new security fixes for Oracle Virtualisation.

Ebay does deal with Icahn

Posted on January 22, 2015 by - News

Faustian_BargainOnline auction outfit Ebay has done a deal with its activist investor Carl Icahn that will give investors a greater say in its PayPal payments unit once it is spun off.

Ebay said it exploring a sale or public offering of its enterprise unit.

The deal clears the way for a future buy  of eBay and PayPal by companies looking to gain a foothold in the e-commerce and online payments markets. Alibaba, Google and Amazon could all be interested.

Meanwhile Ebay is going to cut its workforce by seven percent, or 2,400 jobs, in the current quarter. While the company is making a pile of money, its outlook for the 2015 first quarter and full year fell short of what the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street expected, so its workers will have to pay the price.

The planned job cuts will be across the board in all parts of the company except the board. Payments and enterprise divisions will be hit, eBay said. Restructuring and separation costs are expected to be between $210 million and $240 million in the first quarter and $350 million to $400 million for the entire year.

Also under the deal with Ichan, Icahn Capital executive Jonathan Christodoro was named to eBay’s board. He will have the ability to transition to PayPal’s board once the spin-off occurs.

Two Wall Street bankers has been added to its board, because you always need a board full of bankers.

PayPal agreed to adopt a number of measures proposed by Icahn, which the billionaire said enhance corporate governance at the fast-growing payments arm. The provisions are intended to give shareholders a larger voice in important decisions, particularly an acquisition bid.

They include a provision that any “poison pill” designed to ward off acquisition attempts be ratified by stockholders or expire after 135 days, and that holders of 20 percent of its shares be allowed to call a special meeting of stakeholders.

EBay plans to split its marketplace division from PayPal in the second half of this year. PayPal will be a standalone publicly traded company, which some analysts say will be worth $40 billion.

 

Many companies will miss Windows server deadline

Posted on January 22, 2015 by - News

my_tombstoneCompanies are doomed to miss the end of the life of Windows Windows Server 2003, warned software experts.

The server operating system will retire in six months and many companies will still have boxes running the OS when Microsoft finally kills it off.

David Mayer, the director of Microsoft Solutions for Insight said that companies had adopted an approach that “it is not broken so they did not need to fix it.  It was the first really mainstream server from Microsoft, a really solid OS, and gave Microsoft a lot of credibility in server software.”

Microsoft will end security updates for Server 2003 on July 14 which should end the product’s support lifecycle. It has been supported years longer than the usual decade.

But there are still millions of machines running Server 2003, with pockets of the software in most data centres and it is a significant effort to upgrade.  While getting rid of a dead XP laptop is not a problem, server replacement is tricky.

A server might contain unsupported software and the company that built them may be out of business or the in-house development team may have been disbanded.   Updating this software might be impossible.

Many of those applications are 32 bit and while Windows Server 2012 R2 offers a compatibility mode to run such applications it does not always work.

Microsoft  is likely to make a killing out of after-retirement support contracts, or “Custom Support,” to its largest customers. Under a Custom Support agreement, Microsoft provides patches only for the security vulnerabilities it has rated “critical,” its highest threat ranking.

This time Redmond is suggesting that its customers facing end of support to shift their servers to the cloud. However, that might be an additional change too far for many companies.