Latest Technology News

There are many benefits to the "monolithic" application model -- especially at the beginning of a project -- but monoliths can become unwieldy over time, limiting companies’ ability to move quickly and flexibly in today’s dynamic business environment.

To overcome this and other issues, companies like Amazon, eBay and Netflix are leveraging microservice architectures. The microservices model has been defined by Martin Fowler, author, software developer and an early supporter of microservices as "an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API."

Continue reading →

Windows 10 Creators Update is slowly rolling out to all users but the process may take a while. You can hurry it along, by following the instructions here, or there's another even better way.

If you can’t wait to try the new features, the good news is Microsoft has updated its Media Creation tool to include the update and you can use this to download Windows 10 now and create your own installation media on either a USB flash drive or DVD. This is particularly handy if you want to perform a clean install, or update multiple computers in quick succession.

Continue reading →

Worldwide IT spending will jump another 1.4 percent this year, according to a new report by Gartner. The report says IT spending is expected to hit $3.5 trillion this year. A quarter before, the increase was 2.7 percent, but the difference occurred mostly due to the strengthening of the US dollar.

"The strong US dollar has cut $67 billion out of our 2017 IT spending forecast," says John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner. "We expect these currency headwinds to be a drag on earnings of US-based multinational IT vendors through 2017."

Continue reading →

According to NetMarketShare, Windows Vista's usage share is now down to just 0.72 percent of the desktop OS market. In the real world, that's still quite a large number of people using Vista -- around 10 million or so -- although significantly fewer than those using XP. The ancient OS, which Microsoft stopped supporting in 2014, currently has 7.44 percent share, making it the third most popular version of Windows after 7 and 10. Yes, it's more popular than Windows 8.1 which has 6.66 percent share -- go figure.

Today, April 11 2017, is the day when Microsoft kills its extended support for Windows Vista. If you're still using that OS -- which was never very good even when it was new -- now is the time to really think about making the switch to a more modern operating system, such as Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (which now receives extended support only), Windows 8.1, or Windows 10. We all know which OS Microsoft would like you to choose.

Continue reading →

Sergey Filippov’s excellent Registry editor and search tool Registry Finder has hit version 2.18 with some major additions.

The big news is that searches now run independently of everything else. There’s no need to sit and wait for a search to complete: you can browse other parts of the Registry, carry out edits or other tasks while the search continues.

Continue reading →

Despite the popular belief that artificial intelligence is coming to take your jobs away, accountants would love some robotic help to get them through the day. This is according to a new report by Sage, which says 96 percent of accountants are confident about the future of accountancy as well as their role in it.

Despite welcoming change, more than two thirds of respondents (68 percent) expect their roles to change through automation, in the future.

Continue reading →

We know by now that smart home devices have the ability to make our lives more convenient. Moving beyond devices, some IoT providers are deploying bots, which use artificial intelligence to create hyper-personalized services that will take consumer convenience to a whole new level.

Bots are a relatively new term for most, but this past year consumers have become more familiar with bots thanks mostly to conversations around chatbots. Recently, Wikipedia’s content-editing bots made the news too when Oxford researchers found that they were contradicting edits they were making to articles on the website. The bot-on-bot fights went unnoticed because our knowledge and understanding of how bots interact with one another is limited. As bots began to find their way into other services, we’ll see this problem span beyond Wikipedia, proving an enormous need to understand their interactions.

Continue reading →

Spring is officially here, and for many people, that signals the start of cleaning their homes. "Spring Cleaning," as it is typically called, sees people throwing out unused items, donating old clothes, and rearranging clutter.

If you aren't in the mood for cleaning, Microsoft is offering a less responsible alternative -- shopping. The company's "Spring Sale" starts tomorrow and offers amazing deals on video games, apps, music, TV shows, movies, and hardware. There is great content to be had for Windows, Xbox One, and even Xbox 360. If you need a Windows PC, Microsoft will be offering 33 percent off select models too.

Continue reading →

Transactions are the foundation of business, but too often in our line of work we see payments treated as an afterthought.

As a consumer, we’ve all gone through an online checkout only to find they don’t take our card or our preferred mobile wallet, spotted a product online and struggled to find a place we can buy it, had to leave an app, or, worse still, download one to buy something, or landed on a confusing looking checkout page that looks completely different to the rest of the website.

Continue reading →

USB Type-C has a number of benefits over older connectors, but the one that might appeal the most to the average Joe is its reversible design. This makes it easy to plug a cable in, as you no longer have to guess which way is up -- unlike, for instance, with microUSB. It's not a game-changing feature -- considering Apple's Lightning offered it years ago first -- but I think it's pretty damn close to it.

The problem is that, in order to enjoy that reversible design, you need devices that support USB Type-C. And, right now, not many of them do. However, there is a way to have your cake and eat it too. WinnerGear's MicFlip 2.0 gives you the best of both worlds: it has reversible microUSB and USB Type-A connectors, which means that you can use it without problems with the vast majority of smartphones and PCs.

Continue reading →

The heart of London’s financial district -- The Square Mile -- is getting free public access WiFi, a new press release from O2 states. The telecoms operator also says this is a multimillion-pound project, one of the largest investments in wireless infrastructure in London, so far.

O2 will be working with Cornerstone Telecommunications Infrastructure, which was awarded a 15-year contract to build and maintain City of London’s wireless network. The network itself will be fully operational by autumn 2017, and will allegedly be "more technically advanced" than those found in other global financial centers like New York.

Continue reading →

Pretty much since the launch of Windows 10 there have been complaints about ads and usage tracking in various forms. You might think that Microsoft would listen to complaints and consider removing ads from its operating system, but in fact more and more have been added.

We've looked at the various ads (or app suggestions, app tips and so on to use Microsoft's phraseology) that have cropped up over the last couple of years, but the release of Windows 10 Creators Update seems like a good time to revisit the topic. So here, once and for all, is how to kill all the ads (or whatever you want to call them) in Windows 10.

Continue reading →

If you run into major problems in Windows 10, sometimes the easiest solution is reset the system. You can do this by going to Settings > 'Update & security' and clicking on Recovery. From here, click the 'Get started' button under Reset this PC and pick an option -- you can choose to 'Keep my files', or 'Remove everything' and the tool will reinstall Windows for you, hopefully fixing your problems.

However, there’s a new, even better solution to be found in Windows Defender, called Fresh Start.

Continue reading →

The CIA's range of hacking tools revealed as part of WikiLeaks' Vault 7 series of leaks have been used to conduct 40 cyberattacks in 16 countries, says Symantec. The security firm alleges that a group known as Longhorn has been using tools that appear to be the very same ones used by the CIA.

While it would be obvious to jump to the conclusion that the CIA was itself responsible for the attacks -- and that Longhorn is just a branch of the CIA -- Symantec opts for a rather more conservative evaluation of things: "there can be little doubt that Longhorn's activities and the Vault 7 documents are the work of the same group."

Continue reading →

According to NetMarketShare, Windows 10's usage share growth has stalled recently. It lost some share in February, and made only very minor gains in March. The analyst firm’s numbers seem to suggest that Windows 10 has run out of steam.

But that’s usage numbers -- people using Windows regularly on a monthly basis -- which isn’t quite the same as market share. If you want to know just how well Windows 10 is doing in that respect, Microsoft’s Windows Trends page has the figures you want, and they’re currently showing the new OS losing share to Windows 7.

Continue reading →