Category: PC


Microsoft removes ‘Start’ button from latest Windows 8 build

Filed under: Applications, Computers, Microsoft, OS, PC, Repairs, Software, Technology, Windows, Windows 8 by Ryan Boese — Leave a comment
February 6, 2012

Do you like the Windows ‘Start’ button? Well, if you do, you’d better get used to it being gone in Windows 8 because it seems that Microsoft has removed it from the latest builds of the operating system.

Here’s a leaked screenshot from the near-final Windows 8 “Consumer Preview” version (build 8220) which comes to us via PCBeta.com:

Notice the absence of the traditional Start button? I’ve reached out to a few contacts who confirm to me that the button has indeed been removed and replaced with a hotspot in the corner that will duplicate the functionality offered by the old button.

The Start button was first introduced in Windows 95, and has been present in every version of Windows since.

Now here’s the real question … does Microsoft intend to permanently remove the Start button, or is this a trial balloon and Microsoft is looking to see what the feedback from users will be?

Source:  PCBeta

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Symantec says hackers stole source code in 2006

Filed under: Applications, Computers, Cybersecurity, Internet, PC, RootKit, Security, Software, Trojan, Virus by Ryan Boese — 1 Comment
January 18, 2012

Symantec Corp said a 2006 breach led to the theft of the source code to its flagship Norton security software, reversing its previous position that it had not been hacked.

The world’s biggest maker of security software had previously said that hackers stole the code from a third party, but corrected that statement on Tuesday after an investigation found that Symantec’s own networks had been infiltrated.

The unknown hackers obtained the source code, or blueprint for its software, to Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition, Norton Internet Security, Norton Utilities, Norton GoBack and pcAnywhere, Symantec spokesman Cris Paden said.

Last week, the hackers released the code to a 2006 version of Norton Utilities and have said they planned to release code to its antivirus software on Tuesday. It was not clear why the source code was being released six years after the theft.

Source code includes instructions written in computer programming languages as well as comments that engineers share to explain the design of their software. For example, a file released last week from the source code of a 2006 version of Norton Utilities included a comment that said “Make all changes in local entry, so we don’t screw up the real entry if we back up early.”

Companies typically heavily guard their source code, which is considered the crown jewels of most software makers. At some companies access is granted on an as-needed basis, with programmers allowed to view code only if it is related to the tasks they are assigned.

The reason for all the secrecy is that companies fear rivals could use the code to figure out the “secret sauce” behind their technology and that hackers could use it to plan attacks.

Paden said that the 2006 attack presented no threat to customers using the most recent versions of Symantec’s software.

“They are protected against any type of cyber attack that might materialize as a result of this code,” he said.

Yet Laura DiDio, an analyst with ITIC who helps companies evaluate security software, said that Symantec’s customers should be concerned about the potential for hackers to use the stolen source code to figure out how to defeat some of the protections in Symantec’s software.

“What we are seeing from Symantec is ‘Let’s put the best public face on this,’” she said. “Unless Symantec wrote all new code from scratch, there are going to be elements of source code in there that are still relevant today.”

Symantec said earlier this month that its own network had not been breached when the source code was taken. But Paden said on Tuesday that an investigation into the matter had revealed that the company’s networks had indeed been compromised.

“We really had to dig way back to find out that this was actually part of a source code theft,” he said. “We are still investigating exactly how it was stolen.”

Paden also said that customers of pcAnywhere, a program that facilitates remote access of PCs, may face “a slightly increased security risk” as a result of the exposure.

“Symantec is currently in the process of reaching out to our pcAnywhere customers to make them aware of the situation and to provide remediation steps to maintain the protection of their devices and information.”

Ryan: This is one of the reasons I had been telling people for years not to use Symantec programs. I knew they had been hacked because Viruses had been disabling out Norton on machines I had been fixing and I was seeing a big trend with this.

Source: Reuters / Yahoo! News

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Boxee 1.5 improves user interface, is the last version for PC

Filed under: Applications, Boxee, Computers, Internet, IPTV, Netflix, PC by Ryan Boese — Leave a comment
December 27, 2011

Boxee has spoiled this post-Christmas week with a morsel of bittersweet news. The company has unveiled the latest version of its software for Windows, Mac and Linux. Revision 1.5 is being tested by select “early access” Boxee Box owners with a public beta scheduled in January, but PC users can download the latest build today. The update introduces various changes to the entertainment hub’s interface.

The home screen has received links to the standard menu to launch the integrated Web browser and Live TV (assuming you have the dongle), the menu now appears as an overlay with refined navigation between sections or search. It’s also easier to sort video content and find additional information about the material with an extended synopsis. Boxee says it has reduced the number of clicks required to get around.

The bad news? This will be the last update for PC users. The company has decided that dedicated set-tops will play a larger role in the future of TVs than HTPCs running a conventional desktop operating system. As such, Boxee feels the need to refocus its efforts accordingly. Free downloads of version 1.5 will be available from Boxee’s website through January, but you’ll have to rely on other mirrors after that.

“People will continue to watch a lot of video on their computer, but it is more likely to be a laptop than a home-theater PC and probably through a browser rather than downloaded software,” the developer explained. “To our computer users…thank you for all your support — we would not be where we are today without you,” it acknowledged. Many PC customers are using that fact to protest Boxee’s abandonment plan.

“If you are a current Boxee user on a computer we hope that you will enjoy 1.5 and maybe when you are ready to retire that good ol’ HTPC/Mac Mini you will decide to get a Boxee Box,” the company said. Next year will bring many additions to Boxee’s product line, including the aforementioned Live TV dongle (provides access to the free over-the-air HDTV broadcasts that launched in 2009) and, hopefully, a new set-top.

Download Boxee 1.5 for your PC here.

Ryan: I am loving Boxee on my Media Center PC.  It’s better than Netflix, and you don’t have to pay $7.99 per month to use it because it’s FREE.  You can also watch a variety of local TV Channels like CBC, CTV etc.

Source: TechSpot

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Windows 8: Dead Before Arrival?

Filed under: Applications, Computers, Laptop, Microsoft, OS, PC, Repairs, Software, Tablets, Ultrabook, Windows by Ryan Boese — Leave a comment
December 7, 2011

On the cusp of an event for the Windows 8 app store, one research firm has dealt a painful blow to the forthcoming OS.

“Windows 8 will be largely irrelevant to the users of traditional PCs, and we expect effectively no upgrade activity from Windows 7 to Windows 8 in that form factor,” research firm IDC told Computerworld this week.

For its part, Microsoft  has been quite vocal about its goals for Windows 8, which primarily involve the tablet market. Microsoft, like most of the world, assumes that tablets – which are already encroaching on the desktop PC and laptop markets – will one day become the dominant player in personal computing. Personally, I do not think it will be quite that simple. Instead, I expect a wise manufacturer to combine the perfect tablet with the perfect laptop and make a computer no one can live without. It hasn’t happened yet, but we’re getting closer every day.

Still, for Microsoft to sacrifice Windows 8′s success on the PC just for the sake of tablet sales would be silly. According to Computerworld, Windows 7 has been licensed 450 million times. That’s enormous! The only way Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) could ever top that number is if it licensed Mac OS to third-party PC manufacturers. But that will never (and should never) happen.

For new PC buyers, Windows 7 is still a fairly new OS. But Windows Vista proved to be so bad (and so draining to weak hardware) that people were eager to upgrade. Windows 7 also had the benefit of coming out at a time when laptops had finally reached a nice balance between cost, performance, and durability. Whereas in the past you could spend upwards of $1,000 for a decent Windows XP laptop, the average high-quality Windows 7 laptop retails for $700 to $900. And because Windows 7 machines tend to have at least two gigs of ram, a much larger hard drive, and a vastly superior dual-core processor, their functional value should last a little longer.

In my own personal experience, dual-core processor laptops tend to hold up better after three years of use (2008 to 2011) than laptops with a single-core processor (2005 to 2008).

Unfortunately for Microsoft, this could mean that there will be fewer consumers buying new laptops when Windows 8 arrives than there were when Windows Vista and Windows 7 were released.

However, I am not convinced that IDC’s assessment is accurate. Will the Windows 8 upgrade rate be lower than Windows 7? Probably. From a consumer standpoint, and especially a business standpoint, Windows 8 may not provide enough of a difference to justify a purchase. The layout is cool and inspired, and it may very well be an important step in the Windows evolution. But that’s true of XP, one of the better versions of the software. But did everyone upgrade to XP when it was released? Nope. Did everyone need to make the switch? Nope.

That is the bigger challenge Microsoft faces: convincing us that Windows 8 is must-own software.

Since the company is so determined to make a dent in the tablet market, Microsoft needs to ensure that when Windows 8 is released, there is at least one (preferably several) must-have tablets available. If the company launches a true iPad competitor – or better yet, a true iPad-killer – then there will be very little preventing Windows 8 from attaining long-term success.

Source: Forbes

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Apple Has 1,000 Engineers Working On Chips For The Post-PC Era

Filed under: 4G, Apple, Computers, CPU, PC, Technology by Ryan Boese — Leave a comment
October 9, 2011

As we ponder what will happen to Apple without Steve Jobs, I keep coming back to a conversation I had a few weeks ago with a veteran Silicon Valley CEO who knew Jobs. This was just after Jobs had resigned as CEO of Apple. We got to talking about why Apple is so well-positioned in the post-PC era, and this executive zeroed in on something you don’t hear too often. “Steve Jobs told me he has 1,000 engineers working on chips,” he said. “Getting low power and smaller is the key to everything.”

The number was startling when I first heard it. I knew that Apple started building its own chip design team in 2009, but figured it had to be a few hundred people at most, not 5 percent of Apple’s non-retail workforce. (Apple employs more than 50,000 people worldwide, 30,000 of them in its retail stores). Apple started designing its own chips because Intel and AMD were still stuck in the PC era. Apple needs chips that are powerful enough, but also very low power.

Battery life is one of the most important features of a mobile device. Apple’s latest A5 processor, which first appeared in the iPad 2, will now power the iPhone 4S as well. Not only is the A5 twice as fast as the A4 in the current iPhone 4, but it slightly improves the battery life with 8 hours of talk time (versus 7 hours).

Not only are Apple’s processors extremely power efficient, but Apple is also removing the hard drives from its products and replacing them with flash memory chips. It’s not just iPhones and iPads, the MacBook Air’s storage is also flash. All of Apple’s products are moving in this direction. When you combine these two fundamental changes at the silicon level, “form factor no longer becomes an issue,” explained the Silicon Valley CEO.

You can put a computer into anything. Mobile phones and tablets, certainly. TVs, perhaps. But what else? It is only limited by the imagination of Apple’s engineers and what makes sense from a product point of view.

When Jobs retired, TechCrunch writer MG Siegler cautioned against focusing too much on the next iPhone. Jobs left Apple knowing that a string of post-PC products will be introduced in the years ahead. MG wrote:

It’s the longer roadmap that should really be the grand finale in the Jobs’ fireworks show.

Talking to sources in recent months, there has been one common refrain: that the things Apple is working on right now are the best things the company has ever done. These are things that will “blow your mind”, I’ve been told.

Jobs himself said when he resigned, “I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it.” Now we get to see what he meant by that. Jobs rebuilt Apple from the silicon up. It is the company itself which is his greatest product. And like all of his products, everything fits together: the chips, the hardware, the software, the industrial design, the developer platform, the tightly controlled manufacturing, the marketing, the retail stores.

This machine is proving adept at making and selling mobile computers—phones and tablets. But remember also that we are just at the beginning of the post-PC era. The iPhone launched 4 years ago, the iPad only a year and a half ago. It is becoming practical to put a computer into anything. Of course, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. And if anything, Apple is very disciplined about choosing what not to do (another Steve Jobs trait). But if you believe that post-PC devices will include more than just phones and tablets, it is not such a crazy idea that one day Apple will be churning them out as well.

Source: TechCrunch

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Windows 8 To Offer Both Desktop, Tablet Interface

Filed under: Applications, Computers, Internet, Microsoft, PC, Tablets, Technology, Windows by Ryan Boese — Leave a comment
August 31, 2011

Users of the coming Windows 8 operating system will be able to switch between a traditional desktop PC user interface and a tablet-friendly look patterned after Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform.

Some industry observers clearly have been worried about the dumbing down of the next Windows OS release. However, users who highly value the full-blown desktop experience will have the full set of PC capabilities at their fingertips, said Steven Sinofsky, the president of Microsoft’s Windows division, writing in a blog.

“If you want to, you can seamlessly switch between Metro style apps and the improved Windows desktop,” Sinofsky wrote. “Essentially, you can think of the Windows desktop as just another app.”

Windows 8 tablet users who prefer Windows Phone’s Metro-style UI for accomplishing tasks on the fly will never even need to see the platform’s desktop version.

“We won’t even load it — literally the code will not be loaded — unless you explicitly choose to go there,” Sinofsky said.

Moreover, the new Metro-style UI “is much more than the visual design — [it is] fast and fluid, immersive, beautiful, and app-centric,” Sinofsky said. And tablet users who do not need the full-blown Windows desktop experience won’t have to comply with its more stringent memory, battery life and hardware requirements, he added.

The Innovator’s Dilemma

Microsoft has to negotiate an innovator’s dilemma with Windows 8, said Al Hilwa, director of applications software development at IDC.

“They have to create a product which is appealing to an apparently large segment of the user population who loves a simpler touch-first approach to computing, while maintaining Window’s existing user-base that is comfortable with the precise control a keyboard, a mouse and a file-oriented interface provides,” Hilwa said.

Just how Microsoft will go about accomplishing the delicate balancing act of having both Windows 8 user interfaces operating together harmoniously remains unclear right now. However, more concrete details are expected to emerge at Microsoft’s Build conference for developers beginning Sept. 13 in Anaheim, Calif.

The bottom line is that Microsoft will need to ensure that both user segments remain happy with Windows 8, Hilwa said. The software giant also will need to “maintain two parallel application development models until these begin to blend more naturally down the road,” he added.

The Ribbon Users Love To Hate

Already featured in the 2007 and 2010 releases of Microsoft’s Office business productivity suite, the ribbon is one design element that some Office users love to hate. This helps explain this week’s flurry of negative comments about the addition of a ribbon to the new file management tool for Windows 8.

Still, Sinofsky pointed out that the addition of a ribbon will enable the platform’s designers to create an optimized file manager that positions the most frequently used commands at reliable, logical locations.

“The flexibility of the ribbon with many icon options, tabs, flexible layout and groupings also ensured that we could respect [Windows] Explorer’s heritage,” Sinofsky said.

What’s more, the Windows Explorer ribbon provides for a much more reliable and usable touch-only interface than pull-down-menu or context-menu designs could provide, Sinofsky said. Though some critics have complained about the additional screen real estate that this feature would occupy, Sinofsky said users would be able to display the Windows Explorer ribbon in either an open or minimized state.

Source: NewsFactor

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Acer’s MacBook Air-cloning Aspire 3951 Ultrabook Leaks Out

Filed under: Acer, Apple, Computers, Intel, Laptop, Macbook, PC, Supercomputer, Technology, Ultrabook by Ryan Boese — Leave a comment
August 9, 2011

A hinted-at Acer ultrabook may have had its first public sighting through leaked renders and details in Vietnam. The 13.3-inch Aspire 3951 would borrow more than a few cues from the MacBook Air Intel’s ultrabook spec is meant to imitate and would have a supposedly 0.51-inch thick, aluminum, 3.09-pound shell. In a nod to the Dell Adamo, however, Sohoa‘s look showed that most of the ports would be moved to the back, where the hinge design would make sure they stayed available.

The system would also make the solid-state drive optional. Buyers could pick the likely Intel-made 160GB SSD or opt for more traditional 250GB and 500GB hard drives. Not much is known about the choice of processor other than using a 2011 Core chip, although the Aspire would follow Apple into including Bluetooth 4.0 while swapping out the Thunderbolt for a plainer HDMI output. A card reader is in view on the right-hand side.

Acer is believed to be focusing on longevity, offering a competent though shorter six hours of battery use as well as 30 days of standby; the long idle time might only be true for the SSD option. Moving from sleep to wake should take 1.7 seconds.

Earlier rumors have had Acer’s ultrabook shipping at the very end of the year. The 3951 might undercut the MacBook Air with estimated prices of between $769 to $961 depending on the model, although it’s not clear what a base model would involve. Any lower pricing is likely to entail a slower rotating hard drive and might go below the 1.7GHz Core i5 Apple uses in its own system.

Intel devised the ultrabook spec as a way of sustaining notebook sales in the face of tablets through taking a cue from the Air. The decision may have triggered a pushback from Windows PC builders who have been fighting to lower the price after they were worried they would have no choice but to match Apple’s price after Intel set similar quality and performance goals.

Source: Electronista

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Adobe scraps AIR for Linux, focuses on mobile

Filed under: Adobe, Flash, Linux, PC, Telecom by Ryan Boese — 1 Comment
June 16, 2011

Concluding that its priorities should be on iOS and Android, Adobe Systems has stopped releasing its own version of its AIR programming foundation for Linux.

AIR combines Flash and a Web browser to let programmers build standalone software that runs on any system with the underlying AIR “runtime” that executes the software. It’s cross-platform technology, meaning for example that separate versions of TweetDeck–a prominent AIR app–don’t need to be rewritten for Mac OS and Windows.

But starting with AIR 2.7, released this week, Adobe won’t build a Linux version of AIR anymore, making the cross-platform technology a bit less cross-platform. Instead, it’s relying on partners to do so on their own.

“We will no longer be releasing our own versions of Adobe AIR and the AIR SDK for desktop Linux, but expect that one or more of our partners will do so,” Adobe said in a blog post.

The move contrasts sharply with Adobe’s bitter and public fight last year objecting to an Apple move that barred AIR-based apps from iOS devices. Apple eventually relented for AIR-derived apps, though it still won’t let Flash Player itself onto iOS devices.

In an FAQ (a PDF file no good reason that I can imagine), Adobe said Linux just isn’t where the AIR action is taking place now.

“Our customers are focusing on creating applications for smartphones and tablets, and we are aligning our investment towards new features and platform support for the device market,” Adobe said.

One of the main features of AIR 2.7 is better performance on iOS devices–four times faster in some cases, according to Adobe developer evangelist Renaun Erickson. Also in 2.7 are several features from Flash Player 10.3, such as microphone noise cancelation, and the ability to move the AIR runtime to the SD card on Android.

Linux on PCs has failed to take off widely, and only 1 in 200 AIR downloads are for Linux, added Dave McAllister, who spearheads Adobe’s open-source work.

“With desktop Linux, we see a basically flat growth curve hovering around 1 percent,” citing Net Applications’ NetMarketshare statistics. “And since the release of AIR, we’ve seen only a 0.5 percent download share for desktop Linux.”

Adobe is putting a priority on work that will let those partners port AIR to Linux, it said. “Source code for the Adobe runtimes is available to qualified partners under the terms of the Open Screen Project,” the company said.

Source: CNET

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Windows 8 now available to OEMs via Microsoft Connect

Filed under: Internet, Microsoft, PC, Technology, Windows by Ryan Boese — Leave a comment
April 2, 2011

Select Microsoft Connect partners — major players like HP — have been given their first taste of Windows 8. According to various sources, the build string currently sits at 7971.0.110324-1900, which is the third milestone build of the successor to Windows 7.

So far, there haven’t been many details revealed about Windows 8. An actual System Restore — which is being referred to as History Vault — has been reported, and the feature will allow users and administrators to completely roll back a system to a previous state. A factory reset option is also said to be included.

We’ve also seen Windows Live integration taking shape on the desktop. It’s believed that you’ll be able to log in to Windows 8 using your Windows Live credentials, not just a traditional offline Windows username and password.

Source: Download Squad

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