The price for upgrading to Windows 8 Pro will shoot up after Jan. 31, when the existing special offers to acquire the new OS lapse. on Friday that a Windows 8 Pro upgrade will cost US$199.99, up from special prices as low as $14.99. Microsoft is running two special offers for upgrading to Windows 8 Pro. One is for people upgrading an existing Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 PC and lets them acquire Windows 8 Pro for $39.99 via Windows.com download or $69.99 from a retail store DVD. The other offer, priced at $14.99, is for consumers upgrading a new Windows 7 PC bought between June 2 of last year and Jan. 31.
DivX Plus Software is a desktop media player. And a video conversion application. And a Web browser plug-in. And a codec pack. And a DLNA server for streaming videos to compatible devices. In short, there's not much this free application can't do when it comes to video, and it handles most of the tasks very well. As a desktop media player, DivX Plus is easy to use and attractive. It features a sleek black and gray design that looks more modern than the orange color scheme of , another popular free media player. The design of DivX Plus is busier, though; where VLC tends to fade right into the background so you notice only the video you're watching, DivX Plus is harder to ignore. A column (collapsible, luckily) along the right side of the application reminds you that you can do more than just watch your video, as it sports icons for streaming your video or transferring it to another device. While the icons are large and make all of these tasks look super easy, they were not all quite as user-friendly as I'd expected. The first problem occurred when I tried to stream a video to a networked Samsung Smart TV. DivX Plus got me started on the task, leading me through the process of turning sharing on and identifying which folders I'd like to share, but didn't provide much additional guidance. I would have liked some notification that the files were actually being shared, as I was never able to view them on the TV. I was unable to figure out if it was the TV or the software causing the problem. I had more luck with the DivX To Go feature, which helps you transfer your videos to DivX devices. You select the video you'd like to transfer, and what kind of device you'd like to view it on (such as a TV or Blu-ray player). You then decide whether to burn it to a DVD or save it to a USB drive, and DivX Plus handles the transfer for you. The process isn't super fast, as transferring a 22 minute TV show took nearly that same amount of time, but it worked well.
The death of the Start menu is way up there on my personal list of modern tech tragedies and epic Microsoft blunders. It's almost as egregious as Microsoft Bob, but not as funny. Fortunately, there's no lack of ways to bring it back, from traditional-looking applications such as Classic Shell to bolder reimaginings such as Pokki, a free start menu and app store that shows what Windows 8 might have been. First and foremost, it's a Start menu. Click the button or tap the Windows key on your keyboard, Pokki displays a list of applications that doesn't take over your entire screen. Start typing, and potential applications instantly pop up, alongside custom Pokki apps and real-time results from the Web (something the traditional Start menu doesn't offer). The default theme is light, and the whole thing feels nice and airy. Pokki's search is useful, but it isn't perfect: Apps from the Pokki store are highlighted (even if you've decided you don't want to install them), and there is no way to mix documents from your local hard drive into the search results. Web results are quick to appear, but they tend to be too general. There is no way to search a specific website, such as YouTube. Now, about those apps: These used to be the core of the Pokki experience, back when Windows still had a Start button. Now, they're there mainly to offer added value. It feels like Pokki does want you to know about them and install them, but it isn't overly pushy about it (except for prominently featuring them in search results). Being subtle about a new breed of apps is exactly the sort of thing that could have won Windows 8 some points, and Pokki gets it right.
Plantronics is now shipping new business headsets for travel and desktop use, plus a wireless portable speakerphone, all shown earlier this month at the International CES. The Voyager Legend UC succeeds the Voyager Pro UC as the latest incarnation of Plantronics’ state-of-the-art Bluetooth earpiece for use with mobile phones, laptops or tablets. Its key innovation is technology that lets you answer a call as soon as you put it on—no tapping or clicking required. Its voice command menu lets you choose whether to answer or ignore a call based on caller ID info. Plantronics rates battery life as up to 7 hours talk time and 11 days standby time. The Voyager Legend UC comes with multiple charging options, including a case, desktop charging stand and modular wall charger. It’s available in two editions: the Voyager Legend B235, for most UC (unified communications) systems including those by Avaya, Cisco, IBM, and Skype, and the B235-M, optimized for use with Microsoft Lync 2010 and Microsoft OCS 2007. Sadly, it does not come cheap: Plantronics’ MSRP is $200.
Multiply the joy of watching paint dry by the sheer pleasure of watching grass grow, and you'll get a decent idea of how exciting it is to parse the average corporate earnings report. . Don't get me wrong: Intel's Thursday afternoon earning's call was still soul-suckingly boring. But as one of the cornerstones of the old Wintel homogeny, Intel's yearly results and estimates serve as an unofficial barometer for the PC industry as a whole. As Intel goes, so goes the entire desktop ecosystem, and hidden deep in the company's newly released financial statements are five portents for the PC industry of 2013—and beyond. This one's easy: Next time a pundit tells you the PC is going the way of the dodo, tell him to stuff it. Sure, general PC sales were down slightly in 2012—3 percent in the case of Intel's PC Clients Group, and an estimated 3 to 5 percent for the industry overall—but desktops and laptops still do tremendous business. "If you're looking at 350 million units (shipped in 2012), that is not a dead market," says Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy. "The PC industry may be slowing, but it's certainly not dead."
Although Facebook's Graph Search isn't available to most users yet, once it rolls out more broadly, there won't be any escaping it. in December, saying that only “a single-digit percentage of users” had opted out when the choice was available. (Of course, with 1 billion users, that still translates to at least 10 million people.) is an overhaul of Facebook's existing search box. It lets people type in naturally-phrased queries such as “Restaurants my friends like” and “Photos of people from college,” and see personalized results. Graph Search respects the user's existing privacy settings. So, for example, if only your friends can see your photos, no one else will be able to see those photos in their own searches. In other words, Graph Search isn't showing any information that people otherwise wouldn't be able to see.
It is not often that I get to review a tool using that same tool, but with Dillinger.io, that's just what I'm doing. Dillinger.io is a text editor, with a twist: It lives on the Web (so, nothing to download), it's free, and it's all about Markdown, an easy way to format your text. With Markdown, to produce a bold word, you surround it with double asterisks (like **so**). To make a word into a hyperlink, you surround it with brackets, followed by the link target in parenthesis, producing something that looks like [PCWorld](http://www.pcworld.com). There are lots of little tricks like this, but not so many as to overwhelm or confuse: The nice thing about Markdown is that you can just focus on what you're trying to say, without fiddling with complex formatting toolbars or numerous arcane tags. I usually compose my documents in Markdown using a minimalistic and powerful full-screen editor for Windows, with word count, segment focus, and other niceties for making writers’ lives easier. But one of the few drawbacks of composing a document in Markdown like this is that it's not exactly WYSIWYG: When you italicize a word, you see it surrounded with single asterisks (because that's the syntax for italics), rather than really typed out in italicized letters. When the time comes to render your document to HTML or rich text, you may find formatting that went wrong in surprising ways, and need to go back to your Markdown document to fix things up. With Dillinger.io, this sort of thing doesn't happen, because Dillinger has a split-screen live view: You type your Markdown on the left side of the window, and watch as the right side fills up with your formatted output in real-time. Seeing your text in double-vision can be disorienting at first: We're very used to seeing letters appear on the screen while typing, but seeing two sets of identical letters appear at once is somehow different. After a short adjustment period, though, I found that the dissonance goes away and it doesn't feel as weird.
A business idea starts simply enough: You identify a need, and then you fill it. It seems that a number of innovative entrepreneurs have identified the need to access data from mobile devices no matter where it’s stored, and we’re seeing an explosion of solutions designed to address that need. , Dropbox, and possibly others I’ve forgotten about. Some of the data is redundant—duplicates of data stored elsewhere—and I do my best to consolidate the data I really need in one place, but there’s still an opportunity there for a provider to give me a tool that just lets me access all of it no matter what device or platform I’m using. .
When it comes to keeping my PC secure, I rely on a small handful of tools: Windows 7's built-in firewall, Gmail's spam filtering, Web of Trust's helpful browser plug-in, and Microsoft's free Security Essentials anti-virus utility. At this risk of jinxing things, here's my score to date: My PC: 1. Malware of any variety: 0. However, I recently needed to troubleshoot a program that wasn't working properly, and, as always, the tech support department's first suggestion was to "disable my antivirus program." Normally I ignore this advice, but because the program in question involves a lot of file downloading from various protected servers, I thought it might actually be worth a try. Just one catch: How the heck do you disable Security Essentials?
Nokia has opened its arms to 3-D printing with the release of design files and instructions for making your own Nokia phone case.
A Texas high school on Friday barred a girl from attending class as part of the fallout from a legal flap that began with the sophomore refused to wear around her neck an RFID-chip student ID she claims is the "Mark of the Beast," lawyers connected to the brouhaha said.
Podcast time! On today's episode of the Game|Life podcast, Wired senior editor Peter Rubin joins me to tackle topics on both ends of the levity meter.
As Boeing tries to find a fix for its battery issue, its customers are trying to figure out how to juggle schedules and routes to fly passengers with 50 Dreamliners grounded around the world. And at least one of those airlines is already saying it expects to be compensated by Boeing.
Noblesse oblige, we can restore the celebrity to glory under a time-proven cultural ritual of rehabilitation. But in the case of Lance Armstrong, the ritual of rehabilitation is tested to its limit. He misbehaved so profoundly. He lied so often. He corrupted teammates and a sport. He fell so swiftly and so far that his might be the limiting case, proof that there are some falls from which people just don?t come back.
Samsung's Galaxy Camera feels like a clumsy step toward the future of the point-and-shoot class. There's a 16-megapixel lens that's plenty capable enough. And a 4.8-inch touchscreen on the back, with full Android.
Check out the dance floor-ready remix of Sky Ferreira's sleeper hit here.
After five years of strange adventures,
Honda is losing mindshare and marketshare with the demographic it used to dominate: young people. That's why it desperately needs to put the Gear concept into production.
A social media analytics company looked at what people are saying on Twitter about the New England Patriots, the Baltimore Ravens, the San Francisco 4ers and the Atlanta Falcons &mdash and used to predict who'll win the playoffs and the big game.
Ayasdi, a company that has developed data-visualization software it says uses big data to answer the questions you never thought to ask, has launched in Palo Alto with $10.25 million in funding.
Each week, Wired Design brings you a photo of one of our favorite buildings, showcasing boundary-pushing architecture and design involved in the unique structures that make the world's cityscapes interesting.
It's often said that violence is a sickness, that gun violence threatens public health. Some scientists say these aren't just figures of speech, but literal truths: Violence truly is contagious, spreading through society like an infection.
The Transportation Security Administration is pulling the plug on its nude body scanner program, a decision announced Friday that closes the door to a tumultuous privacy battle with the public scoring a rare victory.
Leprosy has plagued humans for thousands of years, but that doesn't mean it has revealed all of its secrets. A new study in mice suggests the disfiguring disease employs a bit of biological trickery to do its damage: It reprograms certain nerve cells to become like stem cells and uses them to infiltrate the body's muscle and nervous systems.
A U.S. Air Force C-130 medical transport plane landed in Algeria on Friday morning to evacuate some of the hostages freed from their terrorist captors during a chaotic Algerian military operation.
If you've always wanted to create your own monthly subscription box, social commerce startup The Fancy will now do the hard work for you. And here's the beauty part: they pay you a chunk of every sale.
Nathanael Johnson explores the ?care effect? ? the idea that the opportunity for patients to feel heard and cared for can improve their health. Scientific or no, alternative practitioners tend to express empathy, to allow for unhurried silences, and to ask what meaning patients make of their pain.
The results of a contest sponsored by the White House shows how powerful a dose of design can be in treating what ails our medical system.
A new batch of propaganda-style posters for zombie comedy
Three artists have created three data-driven applications that turn your Facebook profile into a 3-D printable objet d'art.
With CES in our rearview mirror, we headed east to Detroit for the second most important trade show of January: the North American International Auto Show. And one automaker utterly dominated.
Want an easier way to log into your Gmail account? How about a quick tap on your computer with the ring on your finger?
Power isn't just an abstraction: It has possessors, supplicants, and hand servants. And it?s not good to be on Power?s bad side if what you do falls into the gray area of enforcing the letter as opposed to the principles of the law.
A new exhibition?of hundreds of camera sculptures made of glass, sand and stone, has us questioning a camera's form over function.
Amazon started collecting sales tax in California in September, and data is starting to trickle in on whether the extra cost has sent shoppers back to brick-and-mortar. So far, the results seem to show the world's biggest online retailer has little to worry about.
brightcove.createExperiences();I'd love to have this curved OLED TV from Samsung in my living room. No, I haven't reversed myself. Samsung says this TV "won't be available to the American market in the near future." So. ...
On this week's episode of the Gadget Lab podcast, reviews editor Michael Calore and staff writer Nathan Olivarez-Giles start things off talking about how CES has changed from a massive show focused on the latest toys from the big boys -- Samsung, Sony and Microsoft -- to a show where the coolest stuff came from little know tech suppliers, scrappy startups and foreign brands trying to move into the limelight. Michael and Nathan also take a look at Samsung's Galaxy Camera, a new hybrid device that adds Android to a point-and-shoot.
Google's daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.
For a time in the early 1960s, Thomas Evans headed up the Advanced Lunar Missions Study Program in the NASA Headquarters Office of Manned Space Flight. By the time of the 11th Annual Meeting of the American Astronautical Society (AAS) in May 1965, however, he had retired from NASA and become a farmer in Iowa. This gave him the freedom to speak his mind about what he felt were the Apollo Program's shortcomings. His advice: think bigger.