Wayne Williams

It feels like repeatedly kicking someone when they’re down, but there’s really no other way to describe Windows tablet sales -- both RT and Windows 8 Pro -- other than pathetic and embarrassing for Microsoft. Which is a shame. Surface is a great tablet, Windows 8 on Surface is a good operating system, but people just aren’t buying the device in any great numbers. Well, pre-fire sale at least.

According to a new report from IDC, just 200,000 Windows RT tablets shipped in Q2 2013 (even the ailing BlackBerry PlayBook managed 100,000), and there’s no good news for other Windows tablets either as IDC reports just 1.8 million devices shipped with that OS onboard. Apple, by comparison, shipped 14.6 million iPads in the same quarter.

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Nokia has released a new video comparing the quality of the Lumia 925’s camera with that of the Apple iPhone 5. You don’t need to be a genius to guess which device comes out the clear winner.

Headed "Better Photos Every Day" the video might seem more than a little familiar on first viewing as it parodies Apple's iPhone 5 commercial and starts with a voiceover informing viewers that "every day more photos are taken on the iPhone than any other phone" before stating "at Nokia we prefer to build for quality not just quantity".

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Internet Explorer might no longer hold 96 percent of the browser market like it did back in 2002, but Microsoft’s browser still remains hugely popular. Firefox and Chrome took large bites out of IE’s dominance, but they have yet to topple it, and don’t look set to do so any time soon.

According to new figures from Net Applications, Internet Explorer 8 is the most popular browser on the desktop with 23.52 percent global market share. And it’s not the only incarnation of IE in the top five either.

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I use Soluto to manage my PCs and iOS devices, as well as hardware belonging to a select group of less technically literate friends and family. It’s a handy service that makes it easy to view hardware details of the devices you’re monitoring, as well as cut boot times, manage and update apps, remove unwanted browser extensions, and more.

The firm has just introduced a new feature called Soluto for Servers which adds Windows servers to the list of devices available to manage. You just need to download an installer and run it on each of your servers.

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Internet Explorer is an integral part of Microsoft's tiled operating system, and the software giant has endeavoured to improve the way it handles touch in Windows 8.1, adding new touch elements and improving existing ones.

In a new blog post Microsoft discusses the changes it has made which, if you’re planning on using the OS refresh on a touch enabled device, you’ll likely find both interesting and welcome.

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Yesterday a striking fact regarding Surface was revealed in a SEC filing from Microsoft. The software giant's tablet lineup brought in revenue of $853 million in the company's fiscal year 2013 -- just under the embarrassing $900 million Surface-related write off Microsoft declared two weeks ago.

$853 million might sound like quite a lot of money, but what it actually means is the tablet line is a flop, with Microsoft selling just slightly more Surface PCs in a year than Apple shifts iPads in a week.

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Microsoft rolled out Windows 8.1 Preview for developers and consumers last month, and now the software giant has followed it up with an enterprise edition.

This differs from the standard Preview release in a number of ways, including introducing additional advanced features such as Windows To Go, Start Screen Control and DirectAccess.

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Windows 8 is an operating system designed for touch PCs, but it's struggling to find a sizeable audience on them. PCs as we know them are on their way out, and tablets are the future, as we've been told time and again by analysts. Figures from the likes of Gartner and IDC clearly back up this sea change.

So if people aren't buying into Microsoft's new OS on regular PCs (with or without touch) then they must be scrambling to buy tablets running Windows 8 and RT surely? Well things don't look too rosy for Microsoft there either.

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My colleague Mark Wilson wrote an interesting article on Sunday about the futility of ISPs and governments trying to block pornography. If you’ve been following the news you’ll know the UK government intends to make accessing adult content on the internet "opt in". That's perfectly legal adult content by the way -- not just the nasty stuff.

Mark also worried about where such a move could lead, saying, "In filtering out porn, how could I be sure that whoever is doing the filtering is not also blocking access to other things, be it through a sense of morality, or by simply miscategorizing something?" Which, it turns out, could be truer than he knew.

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Bing has become the first of the big search engines to display pop up warnings whenever anyone from the UK uses it to look for child abuse images.

When someone enters any of the keywords from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop)’s blacklist into the search site a warning will be displayed informing them that "Child abuse material is illegal" and providing help and advice from Stopitnow.org.

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Microsoft rolled out Internet Explorer 11 Preview for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 yesterday, and also updated modern.IE -- a set of tools and resources designed to make developing for the browser just a little bit easier.

The software giant additionally announced that the modern.IE scanner, which analyzes the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript of a site or application looking for common coding issues, is now open source (under Apache 2.0 license) and available to download from GitHub.

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Your web browser records everything you do on the web. It knows where you go, it knows where you’ve been, what your favorite websites are, and it likely even knows your passwords. But fortunately it doesn’t share that information with the world. At least not yet.

Mozilla, the non-profit behind Firefox, is proposing to change that. The organization wants your browser to be able to tell websites the sort of things you’re into, allowing those sites to serve up personalized content tailored just for you.

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Google is making an announcement regarding a new device today. No one outside of the giant tech corporation has any clue what it might be. No one I tell you. Not a single solitary person anywhere. Except maybe Best Buy.

Of course that leak might just be a total co-incidence. Google could in fact be preparing to announce Hat -- a mind reading/recording device for the head. Or something entirely different.

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For the past decade, Apple has posted year-over-year revenue growth every quarter. The company announced its Q3 2013 earnings yesterday, posting revenue of $35.3 billion. While that beats the $35 billion posted in the same quarter a year ago -- it’s a tight 1 percent growth this time around.

Apple also reported a net profit of $6.9 billion, down from a net profit of $8.8 billion in the same quarter last year. However, average sale prices are lower now, at $581, compared with $608 a year ago.

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I love free software but I’m not a huge fan of all the junk that often gets bundled with programs -- toolbars and the like -- or the changes that the software sometimes wants or tries to make to my search provider. The order, as far as I’m concerned, should always go like this -- Google first, Bing second, Ask never. But so long as the extras are clearly labeled, can be deselected without problem, and easily uninstalled afterwards if I accidentally miss one, I don’t have a real issue with this bundling. It provides a way to get the software for free and funds future development.

However, I’m a savvy computer user and as part of my job I install and uninstall a lot of free software, so I know what to look out for. For the less technically astute, it’s easy to get caught out and end up installing a lot of crap you don’t want. Which takes me to the point of this article -- Oracle and the Ask Toolbar.

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