Search Results for: xp

Hacktivist collective Anonymous is mostly famous for launching attacks on the Church of Scientology, ISIS, world governments, child pornography websites and, er, Kanye West. But its latest mission is to unite humanity and get us working together to go into space and colonize new worlds. No, seriously.

I suspect someone at Anonymous may have enjoyed Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar a little too much.

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You shouldn't believe everything you read online -- no, really, you shouldn't. Just the other day we heard from John Gruber who made the baseless suggestion that Apple invented USB-C (hint: it didn't). Now it's the turn of Tom Warren from the Verge. Yesterday he wrote an article with the headline "Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand". Gosh!

He goes on to talk about Project Spartan (the new default web browser in Windows 10 that we learned about weeks ago) but also immediately contradicts himself in a sub-heading: "IE will live on...". Hang on... I thought it was being killed off? There then followed confusion, back-pedalling, and playing with semantics from Warren that did nothing to clarify the matter and served to rile many on Twitter.

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While other Android makers have long begun to roll out Android 5.0 software updates, Sony is only now starting to make the first Lollipop incarnation available to its customers. The priority is the Xperia Z3 family, which includes Sony's current flagship smartphone.

Sony has decided that Xperia Z3 and Xperia Z3 Compact should be its first smartphones to get Android 5.0 Lollipop. The roll-out starts today, in Baltic and Nordic Europe. Here's what's new.

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The rise of the "3rd platform" is set to cause huge disruption across a wide variety of industry sectors, according to the opening talk at the second day of this year’s Cloud Expo event in London.

Bernard Golden vice president of strategy at ActiveState Software, claimed that the growth of the 3rd platform is another example that the "pace of change is accelerating remorselessly".

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It's reckoned that as much as 90 percent of the world's data has been created in the last two years. That's not only a frightening rate of expansion, it's a problem for IT administrators who need to think about storage on a much larger scale.

Storage specialist PROMISE Technology is launching its latest VSky A-Series product aimed at overcoming the limitations of existing storage solutions.

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Microsoft and Cisco believe the next generation of tools is on the way and that the cloud will be a key feature. There's little surprise in that statement, as things have been trending in that general direction for a while now. Microsoft and Cisco aren't strangers either, as the two have been partnered before, so the latest news simply expands on that relationship.

This time around a tool is being unveiled. According to Microsoft's Aziz Benmalek "next-generation services require close compatibility between hardware, software, network, storage and compute", and the firms have teamed up for a new product called Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform. Benmalek claims that engineers from both companies have worked closely the ensure the integration between products from each. The result is combining Windows Azure Pack and Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI).

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If you’d like to know what someone’s doing on your PC then you’ll probably start with any software traces: browsing history, recent documents, folders, whatever it might be. There are all kinds of options, and they might tell you everything you need to know.

While they’re not so obvious, hardware traces can also be extremely useful. If you could see that an unknown phone or USB key is being connected to your PC at a strange time, say, then maybe someone is using the device to copy your personal documents.

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We aren't too far removed from the death of Windows XP -- sure you can still use it, but you do so at your own peril as the operating system is no longer supported by Microsoft (businesses can pay for extended support -- protection money, if you will). That hasn't stopped many individuals, and indeed even businesses, from continuing to run the OS despite potential for disaster. Granted, that may not be huge, but it is still a very real concern.

Now Windows Server 2003 faces a similar fate, with an impending date of July 14th, 2015 slated to bring an end to another staple of the enterprise. Like Windows XP, customers will not be happy -- enterprises move slowly and upgrades can be costly, not to mention proprietary software that may not work once the move is complete.

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There is one complaint that is constantly levelled at the Android ecosystem, and that’s the notion that it's a platform that has become very fragmented. For all of Google's bluster about Lollipop, only a tiny proportion of handsets are actually running the latest version of the operating system. This is something that doesn't show signs of changing soon.

Sony has revealed news that will undoubtedly upset many smartphone owners -- only the Xperia Z series is in line for an Android 5.0 upgrade. No Lollipop for the Xperia T2 Ultra, the Xperia M2 Aqua or anything from the E series. A perfect demonstration of why fragmentation is so prevalent. Anyone with a non-Z series Xperia is stuck with KitKat, Jelly Bean or whatever version of Android they may have.

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The HTC Re Vive looks to be the main contender against Oculus Rift Crescent Bay, according to early hands-on tests by press at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Using Valve’s own Steam VR platform, the HTC Re Vive does more than strap a smartphone onto a VR headset, it offers the complete package similar to the Oculus Rift.

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Microsoft is now in firm control of the Lumia brand of Windows Phone, which it purchased from Nokia last year. Aside from a slight rebranding, not much about the handsets has changed, and that's a good thing as far as the hardware goes. Perhaps not so much for other aspects, such as apps, but that's not what we're looking at right now.

With Mobile World Congress winding down in Barcelona, Microsoft has announced a potentially important partnership with mobile giant Deutsche Telekom. The deal is aimed towards bringing the phones, as well as cloud services such as Office 365 and OneDrive, to more markets.

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While everyday consumers are important to Microsoft, a decent chunk of its income comes from enterprise customers. This group of users can be slow to upgrade software, and Microsoft is keen to encourage them to upgrade to Internet Explorer 11 before support for earlier versions come to an end in January next year.

The company is only too aware that many people are running web services and apps designed for older versions of Internet Explorer. Laying the groundwork for ultimate upgrades to Windows 10, Microsoft is pushing the Enterprise Mode, the Enterprise Mode Site List and Enterprise Site Discovery feature of IE11 as a way to benefit from security updates and technical support whilst simultaneously paving the way for a Windows 10 upgrade further down the line.

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Two flagship smartphones a year is one too many. Consumers who buy those top-of-the-line handsets do not like seeing their new purchase being outclassed in the same year it launches. Thankfully, Sony has learned its lesson, as there is no Xperia Z4 at MWC 2015. However, it's a bit strange that we're seeing Xperia Z4 Tablet. It's like the tablet division didn't get the memo, naming it after a device that's not here yet.

For those of you not keeping track of Sony's flagship tablets, Xperia Z4 Tablet is the successor to Xperia Z2 Tablet, announced at last year's MWC. The more-recent Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact that made its debut at IFA 2014 features a much smaller display, targeting iPad mini -- instead of full-blown iPad -- buyers. Let's take a look at Xperia Z4 Tablet.

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Windows Phone is a failure. Of course, the term "failure" is subjective, so let me explain. Very few consumers are buying them compared to Android and iPhone, and very few developers are creating apps for it. Yes, some people are buying them, and some talented developers are developing, but "some" does not make a success.

Ultimately, on all platforms -- desktops, mobile devices, game consoles, etc. -- it is the apps and games that move the hardware. Right now, there are no killer apps on Windows Phone compared to Android or iOS. In other words, what is the benefit of using Windows Phone to the average consumer? There arguably is none. Today, Microsoft chooses to proclaim that the platform is seeing "impressive growth". Like "failure", the word "impressive" is subjective, but I think everyone can agree, nothing about Microsoft's mobile platform is currently impressive.

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It’s fair to say, Windows 8.x has enjoyed something of a rollercoaster ride when it comes to usage share. While it’s never been a popular operating system (quite the opposite in fact), share has gone up and down, with gains one month being wiped out by losses the following month.

NetMarketShare’s monthly usage share figures provide a decent guide as to how Microsoft’s tiled OS is doing, and it’s usually pretty interesting, although February was a fairly unexciting month.

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