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The XBMC Foundation has unveiled Kodi 15.2, a maintenance update of its open-source, cross-platform media center. This is the second release since version 15 debuted back in July.

The major focus of the new release is to improve stability on the Android platform, but there are numerous other bug fixes implemented in what Team Kodi has dubbed "The Final Chapter" in its release notes.

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You may have read that some iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus units have better battery life than others, and that, in order to get the "best" version, your new smartphone must come with the TSMC-made A9 processor. The A9 processor manufactured by Samsung has been said to be less energy efficient, leading to shorter battery life. But how much of that is true though?

Consumer Reports has tested two iPhone 6s units, one with a TSMC-supplied A9 processor and the other toting a Samsung-made A9 chip, and found that that the difference in battery life between the two units is entirely negligible. So, naysayers can now put an end to all the "chipgate" talk.

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The environment is news these days with phrases like "climate change" and "carbon footprint" appearing regularly in the news. It's important stuff, given we don't yet have another planet to flee to -- "Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves", said Carl Sagan.

That means we have to be kind to our home. The Environmental Protection Agency hands out awards to companies who work to protect our planet, and Microsoft is a recent recipient.

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IBM has allowed China to review the source code for some of its programs, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, but the details are scarce.

According to the media report, the deal between IBM and the Chinese government is a completely new practice, which was implemented recently. It allows the Chinese government to take a closer look at the source code behind some of IBM’s software, but does not allow for the code to be copied or tampered with in any way.

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If you’re not mathematically inclined then it’s easy to assume that scientific calculators are too complex, out of your reach, not something you’ll ever need or use.

Kalkules is a free and portable scientific calculator for Windows which shows that isn’t necessarily true.

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The problem of ransomware isn’t getting better. Recent examples of widespread attacks, including CoinVault, CryptoLocker and CTB-Locker, show that ransomware has become an important part of the cyber-criminals’ arsenal.

Despite this worrying trend, a survey we, at Kaspersky Lab, conducted recently found that a mere 37 percent of companies across the globe actually consider this to be a serious danger: an oversight businesses simply can’t afford to make.

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Apple Music has managed to retain just 6.5 million subscribers willing to pay for the service four months after launch. Tim Cook has revealed that there are 15 million users in total at the moment, meaning that 8.5 million are making use of the free trial period.

Apple has previously claimed that it was managing to hang onto 79 percent of free trial users, converting them to paid subscribers, but these latest figures -- direct from Cook -- are at odds with this. But the real question is, how many of these paying subscribers simply forgot to cancel their subscription at the end of the trial period?

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More than 250 apps have been pulled from the Apple App Store for secretly gathering users' information including email addresses, device serial numbers and details of other installed apps.

Apple's action comes as a result of a report from analytics service SourceDNA which uncovered the apps built using an SDK from a Chinese advertising company called Youmi. This allowed them to access the information via private APIs and send it back to Youmi's servers.

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The new baby in Microsoft's Surface family is the Surface Book. The convertible device has a striking look, as well as a striking price -- particularly if you opt for the newly announced 1TB model -- but Microsoft has been keen to promote performance.

At launch, the claim was made that the Surface Book is twice as powerful as a MacBook Pro. When the $3,199 1TB model was announced, Microsoft repeated the claim. Being quite a fan of evidence, I was intrigued by the fact that the claims were not being backed up with raw data from benchmarks. I asked Microsoft for more details, and found the company to be really quite cagey (and repetitive) in what it had to say.

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It's one thing to have your Facebook account attacked, it's quite another to have it targeted by government-sponsored attackers. It seems as though attacks of this kind are on the increase, and Facebook has implemented a warning system for anyone whose account comes under such an attack.

But this is about more than just letting you know if someone has tried to log into your account without permission. Facebook believes that the problem is serious enough to suggest that anyone who receives such a warning should consider either formatting their computer, or buying a new one.

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Typically, when consumers want a gaming PC, they will buy or build a desktop. This works well for those people with dedicated gaming areas in their home, but what if you need to move around a lot? What if you want to travel to a friend's house or lan party to game? A gaming laptop is the most convenient option (lugging a desktop around stinks).

If you are a nomadic gamer, always on the go, MAINGEAR has a laptop that could meet your needs. The appropriately named NOMAD 15  now has options for Intel Skylake Core i7, NVIDIA GTX 980M, G-SYNC, and 4K.

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Copyfish is a free Chrome extension for extracting and translating text from images, videos, PDFs and more.

The package couldn’t be any easier to use. Click the Copyfish icon on your address bar, click and drag to draw a rectangle around your text, and wait: the OCR result is displayed in a few seconds, along with a translated version.

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New releases of Microsoft’s flagship operating system are typically greeted with a combination of angst, curiosity, confusion, and dread in equal measure. However, I believe that Windows 10 is Microsoft’s next big achievement.

Breaking the cycle of numbered releases and device specific upgrades every few years, Windows 10 is giving modern IT users what they want, where they want it. With the upgrade strategy change, Microsoft is moving away from Windows as a product to Windows as a service. This makes complete sense on paper, but migration becomes a wholly different proposition to what many organizations have experienced before.

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The number of connected devices is increasing rapidly and producing large amounts of data. Extracting value from that data and gaining useful business insights from it though is a complex process.

Big data applications company Teradata is announcing two new software products that empower business users to uncover and operationalize the insights hidden within Internet of Things (IoT) data.

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If you regularly download small technical Windows tools then you’ll know they’re often incorrectly flagged as malware, even when from very trusted sources.

Which security companies are the worst offenders? Freeware developer NirSoft has released a report scoring Virustotal’s 57 antivirus engines for their response to its utilities.

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