Latest Technology News

Windows XP launched in October of 2001, and so has passed its 12th birthday. Customers using an operating system this old should understand the risks associated with it. Yes, Microsoft is still updating it, and will do so up to April 7th of this year, but that is small compensation for the lack of modern features included in this decade old system.

The company has been through three iterations of Windows since the aging OS hit the market. XP has had a great run, but all things must come to an end. My colleague Brian Fagioli suggested users move to Linux, which I have nothing against, but calling it an alternative to the changes in Windows 8.x is ridiculous -- it’s still a completely foreign operating system with a stiff learning curve.

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Sixty-nine in a series. The last six weeks have not seen any movement in regards to the total number of applications available in the US Windows Store.

Six weeks ago, 105,216 apps were listed in the store, which is about 150 less than this week's 105,379 application count.

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Research firm Gartner places BlackBerry's smartphone market share for all of 2013 at just 1.9 percent, as only 18.6 million units of the company's branded handsets got in the buyer's hands in the past year. Meanwhile, the most popular mobile OS, Android, raked in a whopping 758.7 million unit sales, giving it a market share of 78.4 percent. Why not make the best out of a bad situation by launching BlackBerry 10 OS firmwares for Android smartphones, to slow down the fast-decreasing market share and, maybe, recoup a small part of the one the OS has lost so far?

BlackBerry is basically in a hole it cannot crawl out of right now, as people just do not buy its smartphones as much as they used to. Giving them an option to try its latest mobile OS, BlackBerry 10, will theoretically increase the company's chances of getting back into the game, without allocating lots of resources to the development of new devices, which may or may not (the latter is more likely) be better received compared to the current lineup. And here is how BlackBerry could do it.

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Seventh in a series. There was no round-up of iOS apps last week, not because there weren’t any worthy releases -- this is iOS, there are always great apps to cover -- but because I was away. I’m back now though, and so normal service is resumed.

This week there were some great new apps and games released, including a stunning adventure set inside a pop-up book, a 3D tour through some of nature's wonders, and a game that aims to improve your listening skills (something my wife says I need to do -- or at least I think that's what she says).

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Saving a document as a PDF has several advantages, in particular that it’ll be accessible on just about every device and platform around.

If you need to control exactly who can access your file, though, and what they can do with it, then you might be interested in Free PDF Protector.

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New players in the smartphone market are finding it increasingly difficult to get the mobile operator support they need to expand their reach into new territories as Android and iOS form a duopoly responsible for more than 90 percent share of the market. Even Windows Phone, an established competitor, is struggling as it goes against the tide.

Jolla, being a new player, is no exception. The Finnish company says it is now ready to ship its smartphones across the globe, as it officially announced Sailfish OS 1.0, but the mobile operator support and international availability are not what you may call stellar at this point.

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Scalable Vector Graphics is a powerful image format with support for scripting, filters, animation, interactivity and more. But it’s also XML-based, and not exactly efficient: SVG file sizes can be much larger than you expect, an issue if you’re putting them online.

SVG Cleaner is an open source tool which optimizes SVG images, stripping out unnecessary elements and attributes, compressing whatever’s left, and usually making a real difference to their file size.

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Taking advantage of the availability of 5 TB Seagate HDDs, LaCie has introduced the new drives in three of its NAS devices, that now tout a maximum capacity ranging from 5 TB to 25 TB. The biggest of the bunch has a five-bay layout, which makes it the largest solution in its class that is available on the market today, according to the company.

The smallest of the three is the d2, which can now be had with 5 TB of storage. There are also 3 TB and 4 TB configurations, but those are older. The 2big can offer twice as much at 10 TB. Like its smaller brother, it too can be had with less storage (4 TB, 6 TB and 8 TB), but again those configurations are older. The one that is the most interesting is called 5big, and is the one LaCie calls the largest five-bay solution available now.

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Google has been busy with its Maps service the past couple of days, including a new desktop version, announced yesterday, that will be rolling out soon. But the company has not been too busy for a little vacation, this time traveling to India.

The country is known for many sights, though the most prominent is likely the Taj Mahal, a white marble building that has become a top tourist destination. That wasn't the only place that Google visited, though. 29 more monuments were also included in the new Street View of the country.

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We reported yesterday on businesses being unprepared for the threats presented by BYOD. But according to a new study by Dell this is just one of a range of new threats that are being overlooked.

Technologies like BYOD, mobility, cloud computing, and internet usage, as well as internal actions both accidental and malicious, introduce organizations to a multitude of new risks.

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Like Google+, YouTube had a love affair with white space. This quirkiness was only noticeable to those who have large displays. On my 23-inch screen this meant the video-sharing site had only taken roughly half of it to show me relevant content. To get around this behavior, I had to resort to Google Chrome extensions which could center the page.

I said "had" because, thankfully, YouTube is now smart enough to figure out that when we are using large screens it should adapt its look accordingly. It now centers, yes. And, to my eyes, YouTube now looks more like Google+. That is not a bad thing, really, as, from my point of view, there is nothing wrong with the latter's layout.

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If the announcement of Facebook paying $19 billion in cash and stock for WhatsApp surprised you then maybe you’d forgotten this prediction I published on January 8th:

#6 -- Facebook transforms itself (or tries to) with a huge acquisition. I wrote long ago that we’d never see Facebook in the Dow 30 Industrials. The company is awash in users and profits but it's lost the pulse of the market if it ever had it. Trying to buy its way into the Millennial melting data market Facebook offered $3 billion for Snapchat, which turned it down then rejected a $4 billion offer from Google. Google actually calculates these things, Facebook does not, so where Google will now reverse-engineer Snapchat, Facebook will panic and go back with the BIG checkbook -- $10+ billion. If not Snapchat then some other overnight success. Facebook needs to borrow a cup of sugar somewhere.

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Android handsets are getting a bit stale. Year after year, we get faster specs and bigger screens, but what about innovation? Sure, Samsung has attempted to add features, but those have proven to be more of a gimmick than true innovation. A video pauses when the user looks away? In theory it is cool, but in practice very annoying -- sometimes you look away and want to keep listening to the audio. As an Android fan, I hate to say it, but the fingerprint reader on Apple's iPhone 5s is true quality innovation.

Sadly, even Google's Nexus line has been rather ho-hum. From the Galaxy Nexus to the Nexus 5, its all the same stuff, just minor bumps -- yawn. Today however, Google announces a prototype handset that is so revolutionary, your chest hair may stand on end -- Project Tango.

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I haven't witnessed the devastation of the Amazon, but I've been fortunate, or unfortunate, enough to travel through the American Northwest, a place where "clear-cutting" ran rampant in the 80's. Today's laws have somewhat subsided that practice, but the Oregon and Washington areas are a small sample size on a vast, global scale.

Now Google Maps takes on the issue that faces everyone today -- we need the space, though less-so the paper, and certainly need the oxygen produced. The search giant has put together a new mapping program that is tracking the forests around the world -- or the dwindling numbers of them.

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Xbox One touts its voice control, but some customers feel that isn't quite enough, and using a game controller is not much easier. Harmony supports the console, but not everyone wishes to pay for the high-end universal remote.

Now Microsoft is unveiling a new Media Remote for the gaming system. This isn't entirely unexpected. After all, last week Amazon Canada accidentally reveled the little remote control on its retail website.

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