Latest Technology News

Google's self-promoting Chromebook educational sales is more than public relations fluff. Laptops running Chrome OS provided "all the growth" in the otherwise troubled U.S. retail PC market during back-to-school buying season, according to NPD. Otherwise, overall PC sales fell 2.5 percent, with desktops down 5 percent and notebooks off by 2 percent. Mac laptop sales sank 3 percent and Windows notebooks by 6 percent. Chromebook sales topped 175,000 units.

"Chromebook sales are being helped by demand for low-cost computing", Stephen Baker, NPD's vice president of industry analysis, tells me today. "We saw strong sales in under-$300 Windows products as well". But Windows is established, while Chromebook is new and necessitates a mind-shift reset: Mostly working in an Internet-connected web browser.

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Apple is ordered to pay ¥330 million ($3.3 million) to Japanese inventor Norihiko Saito after a court ruling.

The case refers to the click wheel controller used on iPod Classics since 2004. The court heard that Mr Saito's company held a patent for the technology dating back to 1998.

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Windows 8 started out on shaky legs, but Microsoft's flagship platform found firmer footing during the lucrative back-to-school buying season, foreshadowing Santa could deliver gifts, rather than coal, this holiday season.

"Touch appears to be coming into its own as a core feature in the Windows ecosystem", Stephen Baker, NPD's vice president of industry analysis, tells me today. The analyst firm released new U.S. retail data showing two bright spots among otherwise tepid sales. "Chromebooks and Windows touch helped offset what could have been much steeper declines this back-to-school season", he says.

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CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (yes the acronym doesn't work unless you speak French) and LHC, the Large Hadron Collider, have been in the news quite a bit in recent times. The search for, and possible discovery of, the elusive Higgs Boson, the so-called "God-particle", is a major step forward for science.

Now the Google Maps Street View team have hung up their snorkels, dusted off their hiking boots, sailed home from the Galapogos and set their sights on a bit of science.

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When it comes to Linux, the potpourri of available desktop environments can be both scary and exciting. It can be a hard decision for a beginner, but a fun one too. Over the years I have tried a plethora of environments and they all have strengths and weakness. Ultimately, I fell in love with the controversial Gnome 3. I say controversial because the changes from version 2 to 3 were quite radical and many users did not like them. However, as version 3 progresses and improves, Gnome 2 loyalists are starting to take notice.

Yesterday, the newest iteration, Gnome 3.10 was released. According to the Gnome website, "the GNOME project is proud to present GNOME 3.10. The release comes six months after 3.8, and contains 34,786 changes by approximately 985 contributors. It contains major new features as well as a large collection of smaller enhancements. 3.10 provides an improved experience for users, as well as new capabilities for application developers".

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Tomorrow was supposed to the day BlackBerry held a conference call and webcast to discuss its Q2 earnings, but the company has now cancelled this. Complete second quarter financial results will still be released tomorrow (Friday, 27 September) at 7:00am ET, but there will now be no public follow-up immediately afterwards.

More details will be released, however, when the company publishes the Management’s Discussion and Analysis and consolidated financial statements next week.

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Enterprise collaboration specialist Huddle has launched its new Content Connector tool to release organizations from what it calls "the pain of SharePoint" and other legacy content management systems.

Content Connector enables organizations to seamlessly migrate large amounts of content out of their unwieldy and complex SharePoint deployments, which are difficult to manage and upgrade, and into Huddle’s secure cloud. By doing so, organizations can transform the way they work, support an increasingly mobile workforce and benefit from cross-firewall collaboration.

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The VideoLAN organization has released VLC Media Player 2.1, a major new build of its popular open-source, cross-platform media player. Version 2.1, codenamed "Rincewind" is an essential app for Windows 8 users wishing to play DVD video on their PCs without having to pay for the privilege.

VLC 2.1 adds hardware decoding support to three major platforms and hardware encoding support for Windows, plus rewrites the audio core to provide better volume and device management.

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With its collaborative platform for DevOps teams, Colorado-based VictorOps aims to combine the power of people and data to solve IT problems in real time.

VictorOps builds on the concept of a live timeline of alert data, platform intelligence and team interaction to create IT situational awareness. In addition it seamlessly orchestrates incident identification, escalation, notification, and remediation among team members regardless of their physical location or the time of day.

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Following Samsung's Galaxy Gear, another smartwatch enters AT&T's portfolio. The US mobile operator has announced that its customers will be able to pick up the Pebble, one of the most popular devices of its kind. It will be available starting tomorrow, September 27, from AT&T's online store and "select" retail locations.

Unlike the Galaxy Gear which costs $299, AT&T will sell the Pebble for $150 which is the same amount that users would have to pay when buying it from the official website. For the money, buyers get a smartwatch which works in conjunction with Android and iOS handsets via a Bluetooth connection. As one of the first devices to gain traction on the market, the Pebble has an attractive ecosystem developed around it: there are various apps and ways to customize it.

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Microsoft is going on the offensive trying to demonstrate that Office 365 is better than Google Apps. A series of tweets sent out via the Why Microsoft Twitter account link to articles on the Why Microsoft website in which Office is compared to Google's offering in various scenarios. This latest campaign appears to be not just an exercise in advertising Office 365, but in actively putting down Google Apps.

A series of infographics draw comparisons between using the two tools in different professions. Things kicked off with a look at the life of a sales rep but there are other scenarios including the daily activities of a teacher and Microsoft is also keen to point out how different a company it is to IBM.

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Australia-based software company Hexigo is set to bring its cloud-based decision management tool to the US. But rather than just jumping on the collaboration bandwagon, this software is slightly different from the raft of project management and business social network tools we've seen of late.

Launched in Australia in February/March 2013 and already in use by a number of large organizations including government agencies, Hexigo is a decision tool. It brings people together from across business units, or even across companies, and creates a centralized decision history. This means that once a decision is reached there's a trail showing all of the discussions leading up to it. This helps with knowledge retention when employees leave or move on to other roles. The information can be used to educate new team members, guide strategic planning and keep projects on track.

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If you like your backup software to be feature-rich, then Acronis True Image 2014 will have instant appeal. There’s support for backing up files and folders, as well as creating images of partitions or entire hard drives. You can back up data on demand, according to a schedule, or automatically, as files are created or changed. And your backups can be saved to local drives, across the network, or to your own online storage space.

But that’s just the start. You also get a folder synchronization tool. A "Try & Decide" module lets you make changes to your PC in a virtual workspace, and roll them back if anything goes wrong (as long as you’re not using a GPT disk, anyway). There’s a boot manager, a Clone Disk wizard, secure deletion options, various disaster recovery tools, and the list goes on.

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What, you were expecting dancers and clicking covers? No, it turns out having tried and failed to sell the original Surface in that way, Microsoft has decided to take a different tack for the follow ups, with an advert that actually highlights -- at speed -- some of the reasons why you might want to consider buying the updated tablet.

The 30-second spot, titled "Surface 2: Thinner. Lighter. Faster" focuses on (can you guess?) the tablet’s dimensions, weight and speed, but also very briefly shows the revised kickstand’s two angles and Surface’s choice of clickable covers, including a backlit one.

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Back in the 90s, while everyone was watching Melrose Place and listening to Pearl Jam, internet usage was exploding. At the time, the Netscape Navigator browser was all the rage -- it was the most popular way to access the web. One of the most innovative features of Netscape was the introduction of plugins. You see, this ushered in the era of web-based multimedia. For example, while it is almost extinct now, the Realplayer plugin was mind blowing -- you could stream video in a web browser; amazing at the time. This was all thanks to the Netscape Plug-in API (NPAPI).

Of course, all things must end, and Netscape Navigator is just a memory; a no longer developed piece of software. However, despite that particular web browser's demise, the NPAPI lives on. Unfortunately for NPAPI, Google Chrome and the Chromium project have just put it on death row -- lethal injection in 2014.

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