Many of us use laptops that we can take anywhere we might want to work or play. But good laptops can be pricey, and aren’t always powerful enough to play the latest games or edit videos and graphics. So you might want to consider a desktop PC. These powerful workhorses can whip through the most demanding tasks, and unlike the bulky, beige boxes that cluttered tabletops in the past, today’s desktops are stylish and compact. Here are some of the key points to consider before you buy. The processor is the engine of the PC. The faster and more powerful your processor is, the more your computer can get done in less time. Intel’s Core processors come in three basic flavors: i3, i5, and i7. It basically boils down to good, better, and best. Core i3 processors are typically found in economy, or entry-level systems, while Core i7 chips outfit high-end PCs, and Core i5 rests comfortably in the middle. For basic computing, either Core i3 or Core i5 will work fine, but if you anticipate needing extra horsepower, particularly for advanced gaming, spend a little extra to get a Core i7 system. If the processor is the brain of the PC, the memory is the fuel. As you open up different applications on your desktop PC, they are loaded into memory where the computer can access and interact with them. The amount of memory your PC has determines how many different applications can be open and running at once, and greatly influences the overall performance of the computer.
LinkedIn used to offer a pretty passive experience: Put your resume on the professional social networking site and hope it catches a recruiter’s eye. But LinkedIn isn’t resting on its laurels, especially when it comes to mobile—the network is making the job-hunting experience a little less stressful with a new update for iOS and Android to let you fill out job applications on the go. LinkedIn in April and made it easier to in July, but you couldn’t submit any in-app resumes. “Our ‘Jobs you may be interested in’ feature has been a huge hit with job hunters and even professionals who may not be looking,” LinkedIn associate product manager Vaibhav Goel wrote in a Monday blog post. “As a result of our highly personalized job recommendations in the mobile feed, we’re seeing members who never view jobs on the desktop, viewing and saving jobs on mobile.” To capitalize on that growth, the network decided to add a mobile feature that lets you .
Microsoft got out the axe again, and . While the move may help boost the anemic sales of Microsoft’s tablets, it’s not significant enough to make a real impact—especially for business users. It’s being framed as a sort of “back-to-school” promotion, following closely on the heels of a tablets. Saving money is great, and $100 is $100, but the cost of Surface Pro models is still high compared with some competing devices, and the reduced price is unlikely to sway a purchasing decision. From a business perspective, many users could , which starts at $500—$300 less than the discounted Surface Pro. The Dell Latitude10 has a less powerful processor, less RAM, and less storage capacity than the Surface Pro—so you get what you pay for to some extent. However, for less than the discounted cost of the 64GB Surface Pro, a business can buy a Dell Latitude 10 with 64GB of storage that also includes a removable battery, mobile broadband connectivity, biometric fingerprint scanning, and a smart card reader.
A Wisconsin IT professional has filed a lawsuit against Indian outsourcing firm Infosys alleging that the company discriminates against U.S. job applicants in favor of South Asians for jobs in the U.S. Brenda Koehler, an IT worker with 17 years of experience, alleges that Infosys ignored her qualifications and eventually hired a Bangladeshi worker to staff a position she was qualified for. Koehler and her lawyers are asking the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin to allow a class-action lawsuit against Infosys, with “thousands” of potential plaintiffs in the case, according to the lawsuit, filed Thursday. “Infosys has engaged in a systemic pattern and practice of discriminating against individuals who are not of South Asian descent in hiring,” Koehler’s lawyers . A representative of Infosys said the company categorically denies the allegations. “We’re an equal-opportunity employer,” she said.
Sixty percent of people ages 50-64 use social networking this year, up from 6 percent in 2005. Among people ages 30-49, the percentage also increased sharply, according to survey results released Monday by the Pew Research Center.
Oracle has introduced a new software package for its Exalytics high-performance analytics appliance that in some cases, will be mandatory. Monday. However, it is not mandatory for Exalytics customers that only run Oracle’s Endeca information discovery software, according to the post. Customers also have the ability to purchase the In-Memory Software product under a Named User Plus licensing model, with a minimum of 20 users. Those licenses are listed at $370 per user, providing a potentially more economical option for companies with modest needs.
Are you #tagging your business's posts on Facebook and clicking , was marketed as a great way to give marketers more power over their messaging, as well as give users another way to search for content they're interested in. You know, just like Twitter. Despite their massive popularity on Twitter, hashtags on Facebook have yet to take hold in any meaningful way. Simply Measured, which analyzes social media companies and measures online marketer performance, says that as of the end of June, , with 20 percent of all business posts containing them. That seems extremely high based on a cursory spin I took today through some big brand's Facebook pages, but either way, their impact appears muted, to say the least. "So far, brand posts containing hashtags are not driving additional engagement," says the report, "but are performing at the same level as posts without hashtags, suggesting that people are not yet discovering brand posts by their tags." Per the same study, what is performing well is Facebook's tried and true: Photos account for 74 percent of brand posts on the social network, and in the aggregate they command 95 percent of total engagement. (Also, for the record, once your status update's character length exceeds 99 characters, engagement begins to drop off considerably. In general, the longer the update, the worse it performs.) Why aren't hashtags performing on Facebook the way they do on Twitter? (Twitter posts with hashtags are to be retweeted as tweets without them.)
Sales of tablets, including Apple’s iPad, slowed during the second quarter, according to a Monday report by IDC. But the real news may be the rise of “no-name” tablets, which are now the largest segment of the tablet market. IDC’s report indicates three trends: First, while tablet sales slowed somewhat from the first quarter, they show no signs of stopping. Compared to a year ago, tablet sales grew 59.6 percent to 45.1 million units, though they fell 9.7 percent from the first quarter. Second, Apple’s virtual monopoly in the tablet market has been eliminated, as Apple’s market share fell from 60.3 percent to 32.4 percent in a year’s time. Finally, consumers apparently don’t care if they buy a tablet from a cheaper, no-name brand, as a whopping 45 percent of tablets sold within the “other” category. IDC analysts, however, attributed the tablet market slowdown as a whole to Apple and its lack of new iPad models, using the inverse of the “rising tide lifts all boats” argument. “A new iPad launch always piques consumer interest in the tablet category and traditionally that has helped both Apple and its competitors,” said Tom Mainelli, research director in charge of tablets at IDC, in a statement. “With no new iPads, the market slowed for many vendors, and that’s likely to continue into the third quarter. However, by the fourth quarter we expect new products from Apple, Amazon, and others to drive impressive growth in the market.” After , market leader Apple sat on the sidelines in 2013 and saw a 14.1 percent drop in shipments to 14.6 million iPads. But the remaining four of the top five vendors experienced massive growth, IDC reported. Of those, Samsung nearly quadrupled its Galaxy Tab shipments from a year ago, from 2.1 million to 8.1 million units. Asus grew 120 percent to 2.0 million units sold, and Lenovo jumped 313 percent to 1.5 million. Fifth-place Acer grew 248 percent to 1.4 million units.
Intel has posted information on its website about new tablets for the education market with 10-inch and 7-inch screens, Atom chips and the Android OS code-named Jellybean.
There's a downside to being adept with computers: Sometimes you work so fast, you get yourself into trouble. For example, I routinely keep lots of tabs open in my browser (Google Chrome, in case you're wondering). When I mouse up to click a particular tab, my cursor lands very close to the "x" in the adjacent tab. If I'm in a rush or just not being very careful, I'll sometimes click that "x" by mistake, closing that adjacent tab instead of switching to the one I wanted to view. D'oh! Likewise, Windows' maximize icon resides precariously close to the close-window button in the top-left corner of every window. If my mouse cursor slides just slightly to the right, now I've closed my application.
Vizio Internet Apps Plus is the company's name for its new full-screen app launcher, as well as a group of new apps and features for its smart TV platform.
...it can't create archives. Despite this, it's a neat little app to have in your Windows right-click menu.
We’ve all heard the phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words”. It may be trite, but it’s also true—and a video is worth even more than that. Photos and videos capture a moment in time. They can let a friend on the other side of town, or a relative across the country feel like they were there, and they’re a window to our own memories—triggers that can instantly take us back in time to relive experiences. A decent camera makes all the difference. Whether you’re trying to capture a beautiful sunset, share a photo of a delicious meal, record a baby’s first steps, or talk face-to-face with a friend around the world, you want the image to be sharp and clear. Most smartphones are equipped with a camera. In fact, many have cameras on both front and back so you can use the device as a traditional camera, or for engaging in video chat using a service like Skype. Smartphone cameras are exceptionally convenient because you almost always have your smartphone with you, and the quality of these tiny cameras has improved drastically in recent years. The HTC One’s Ultrapixel camera has great low light sensitivity and fast shutter speed to reduce image blur. Cameras built into Samsung and Nokia smartphones offer up to 41 megapixels and are even like manual focus and white balancing.
, the bleeding edge test build for the Chrome desktop browser. first noticed the addition. But that's not all: Chrome Canary also includes rudimentary support for Windows 8's virtual keyboard in desktop mode, launching it whenever you tap a text field or the address box. And buried deep inside of Chrome Canary's secretive flags menu is a new "enable pinch scale" meant for pinch-to-zoom functionality. After giving the features a whirl, it's clear why all these digit-dandy features are still in the Canary stages: touchscreen input recognition seems hit-or-miss in general, the scrolling implementation is somewhat laggy, the onscreen keyboard often needs to be manually banished, and I couldn't coax pinch-to-zoom into working whatsoever. (The Verge dubs pinch-to-zoom "more experimental than the swipe navigation.")
. For $5/month (or a $99 lifetime membership) Pro members will get access to article search, secure https connections, and “one-click” Evernote integration (the free version of Feedly already offers Evernote integration via the share button—I have reached out to a Feedly rep for clarification)*. and will roll-out to all the associated apps in due time. The company also states that it will add more functions to the Pro accounts over time as it continues to invest in the popular free version. : A Feedly rep circled back with following clarification regarding Evernote: "[Evernote] integration that was available previously in the free version had issues. Feedly decided to invest the time to work closely with Evernote. The new Evernote integration included in feedly pro, was done via Evernote's new API, and works seamlessly."
The latest Web technologies can be used to build a secure and distributed file storage system by loading a piece of JavaScript code into users’ Web browsers without them knowing, a researcher demonstrated Sunday at the Defcon security conference in Las Vegas. The botnet-type system is called HiveMind and was built by Sean T. Malone, a principal security consultant at penetration testing firm FusionX. HiveMind uses technologies like HTML5 WebSockets and Web Storage that are also used by legitimate Web applications. There are no malicious exploits being used, so there is nothing that can be patched to prevent it, Malone said. However, building the botnet by getting other people’s browsers to load a piece of JavaScript code and storing data on their computers falls into a legally gray area, he said.
Beyond mere "best of" lists, Browse has a playlist for every mood, occasion, and news clip.
A new press invite leaves little doubt that Samsung's latest phablet will be launched at IFA Berlin, just like its predecessor.
Sony Online Entertainment has announced Everquest Next, promising to change the way we play MMOs.
There are good reasons not to use a credit card online--or at all. Shopping online increases the odds that someone will steal your credit card number. You may want to make a purchase without your spouse knowing about it. And the buy-now-pay-later aspect of credit cards encourage some people to dangerously overspend. But the online economy is very much a credit card economy. If you're going to buy a song, book, tablet, or just about anything online, you'll be expected to enter a credit card number. Fortunately, there are options.
Patent company Guidance IP has filed a complaint against T-Mobile USA for allegedly infringing a patent related to cell phone geolocation.
Kirobo, a talking robot that also recognizes faces, was launched Sunday on a cargo transfer vehicle and will reach the International Space Station in six days.
As the back-to-school season starts in earnest, Microsoft is hoping to stoke desires for its Surface tablets with yet another discount, mere weeks after . This time around, however, the company is offering a $100 price slash on the Intel-powered Surface Pro tablets featuring the full version of Windows 8. Separately, Acer has instituted its own price cut, lowering the price of the 8-inch Acer Iconia W3 Windows tablet by $80. Microsoft’s offer is available directly from the Microsoft Store and covers only the 64GB and 128GB versions of the touch tablet. A is available online from a number of Microsoft resellers. With the discount, you can now get a 64GB Surface Pro for $800 or a 128GB version for $900. The offer does toss in the vital Touch or Type cover for free, and unlike its ARM-based cousin, the Surface RT tablet, the Pro does not come with a free copy of Microsoft Office. The Surface Pro offer expires on Thursday, August 29.
A large number of websites shielded by an anonymizing service vanished from the Internet on Saturday, an action that may be linked with an arrest of a man in Ireland. The websites, which appeared to have been supplied connectivity by Freedom Hosting, were only reachable with a web browser configured to use the TOR (The Onion Router) network. The TOR network randomly routes Internet traffic through a worldwide network of servers that help mask identifying information such as IP addresses. Freedom Hosting specialized in supplying connectivity for TOR-configured websites and was widely believed to be connected to a man named Eric Eoin Marques. According to , an Irish publication, Marques appeared in court on Friday in connection with a U.S. extradition request based on four charges filed in Maryland that he allegedly distributed and promoted child pornography. The newspaper reported that an FBI agent who testified on Friday described the 28-year-old as “the largest facilitator of child porn on the planet.” Marques was denied bail and is due to appear in court again on Thursday, the Independent reported. The newspaper did not, however, make a reference to Freedom Hosting.
Actor Will Smith captured the attention of Defcon attendees when he showed up unexpectedly at the hacker conference on Sunday apparently to do research for an upcoming movie. The actor attended a talk that featured Apollo Robbins, a renowned sleight-of-hand artist, security consultant and entertainer, who is best known for picking the pockets of Secret Service agents during an encounter with U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Smith came at the invitation of Robbins, who is coaching him for an upcoming movie, said Chris Hadnagy, the CEO of social engineering consultancy and training firm Social-Engineer and organizer of the Defcon social engineering contest. According to Hadnagy, Smith was brought in through a back door so he can sit in and hear the talk that he, Robbins and Michele Fincher, another Social-Engineer representative, gave.
Twitter has revised its guidelines around abusive behavior following bomb and rape threats made against several prominent female users of the service in the U.K.
A feature that allows Android users to authenticate themselves on Google websites without having to enter their account password can be abused by rogue apps to give attackers access to Google accounts, a security researcher showed Saturday at the Defcon security conference in Las Vegas. The feature is called "weblogin" and works by generating a unique token that can be used to directly authenticate users on Google websites using the accounts they have already configured on their devices. Weblogin provides a better user experience but can potentially compromise the privacy and security of personal Google accounts, as well as Google Apps accounts used by businesses, Craig Young, a researcher at security firm Tripwire, said during his talk. Young created a proof-of-concept rogue app that can steal weblogin tokens and send them back to an attacker who can then use them in a Web browser to impersonate a victim on Google Apps, Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Voice and other Google services.
Startup Crossbar emerged from stealth mode Monday to announce its version of RRAM (resistive random-access memory), a new type of memory that could be a successor to flash storage and DRAM. The company, founded in 2010, will make and license its RRAM, a nonvolatile memory, which will be smaller, faster and more power-efficient than NAND flash and RAM, said George Minassian, CEO of Crossbar. "It is higher density ... and the current is much lower," Minassian said, adding that the memory's physical and power attributes make it a suitable replacement for storage in smartphones, tablets, PCs and servers. Crossbar is claiming RRAM will deliver 20 times faster write performance, 20 times less power consumption and 10 times more durability than NAND flash. The memory chips will be stacked, and a 1TB module will be roughly half the size of a NAND flash module with similar storage, Minassian said.
What’s in a name? HP goes for an emotion to describe its high-end computers: Envy. Acer conjures aggressiveness for its gaming PCs: Predator. And Dell uses a spelling-challenged acronym for its best PCs: XPS (Xtreme Performance System). What concept does Digital Storm seek to conjure with its pricey ($2200) Virtue midtower gaming rig—moral superiority? The company’s actual goal isn’t quite that lofty. “We noticed there are not many PC manufacturers designing mid-tower gaming systems with the same ardor and attention that ultra-tower PCs receive,” Digital Storm’s director of product development, Rajeev Kuruppu, said when the Virtue was announced. “As its name suggests, Virtue represents a higher standard of PC gaming, both in terms of aesthetics and performance.” To reach that standard, Digital Storm packed an unlocked Intel Core i7-4770K CPU from Intel’s new Haswell family of processors, 16GB of DDR3-1600 memory, and Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 780 discrete graphics card into a compact steel-and-brushed-aluminum case. (The Virtue also comes with Windows 8.) The result is a compact gaming rig that delivered a very respectable Desktop WorldBench 8.1 score of 399. It fell just short of the cheaper ’s score of 421, though the latter is a full-size tower and has a more powerful video card. Why? While neither manufacturer elected to overclock its system, Micro Express splurged with a 512GB SSD where Digital Storm provides just a 120GB SSD. As a result, the MicroFlex performed much better on our productivity benchmarks. On the gaming front, the Virtue bested the MicroFlex 47B on both our synthetic and real-world benchmarks, delivering a 3DMark Cloud Gate score of 26214 versus the MicroFlex's 24864 at a resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels. With real games and visual quality set to Ultra, the Virtue just missed reaching the coveted 60-frames-per-second mark with Dirt Showdown at 2560-by-1600-pixel resolution (it hit 57.3 fps, versus the MicroFlex 47B’s 41.4 fps). The same goes for BioShock Infinite at those settings: Digital Storm’s system reached an impressive 55.4 fps compared with the Micro Express tower’s frame rate of 46.9.
«Es ist fast wie Fleisch», sagte eine Testperson nach dem ersten Biss in den Burger aus dem Labor. In einigen Jahren soll künstlich hergestelltes Fleisch zum Verkauf stehen. Tierethiker Markus Huppenbauer ist skeptisch.
Er wiegt 142 Gramm und kostet rund 300'000 Franken: Der Labburger. In London wurde heute der erste im Labor erzeugte Hamburger gekocht. Zwei Freiwillige wagten den ersten Biss.
Ein Roboter streichelt 22 Testpersonen am Rücken. Gleichzeitig betrachteten die Probanden über ein 3-D-Display ein Abbild von sich selbst. Der Effekt: Die Menschen glauben, sie verlassen ihren Körper.
Fliegerfans konnten sich auf dem Militärflugplatz kaum sattsehen. Ein Jumbo brachte Bertrand Piccards Solarflieger nach Dübendorf. Die Boeing 747 verliess die Piste kurz vor der Mittagszeit.
Forscher der ETH Lausanne (EPFL) haben die Angriffsstrategie gewisser Bakterien entschlüsselt. Das könnte zu neuen Therapien führen, insbesondere bei einigen Bakterien, die Antibiotikaresistenz entwickeln.
Er ist 35 Meter hoch und hat eine Krone von 113 Metern Umfang: Der mächtige Nussbaum von Meinier GE. Die Gemeinde feiert im September den 150. Geburtstag des Baumes.
Er ist 34 Zentimeter gross und ein Kilogramm schwer: In Japan ist die erste Rakete mit einem Androiden an Bord ins All gestartet. Der Roboter namens Kirobo soll Astronauten in der Raumstation Gesellschaft leisten.
Deutlich mehr Säugetiere als erwartet leben in festen Beziehungen, das zeigt eine neue Studie. Zum Beispiel bleibt das Männchen der afrikanischen Zwergantilope seiner Partnerin ein Leben lang treu.
Der zweithöchste Wolkenkratzer der Welt ist kurz vor der Fertigstellung. Beim 632 Meter hohen Shanghai Tower ist das letzte Gebäudeteil auf die Spitze des Turms gehoben worden.
Veränderungen im Gehirn bei Übergewicht schalten die natürlichen Stoppsignale aus. Auch der Fettgehalt der Nahrung beeinflusst die Balance zwischen Kalorienbedarf und -aufnahme.
Wo Astronomen ins weite Universum gucken, pflanzen Bauern in fruchtbarem Ackerboden Kartoffeln an. In der Nähe der Sternwarte Zimmerwald im bernischen Wald liegen Knollen vom Licht geschützt in aufgehäuften Erddämmen. Locker finden die Wurzeln ihren Weg.
Fünf Kilogramm Rüebli, jährlich. Das darf sich der Gemüsebauer bei günstigem Klima auf einem Quadratmeter dieses Moorbodens erhoffen. Eine gute Ernte. Der Flecken auf dem Bild liegt im bernischen Witzwil zwischen Bieler- und Neuenburgersee, im «Grossen Moos», dem grössten kultivierten Flachmoorgebiet in der Schweiz.
Wegen wegschmelzender Gletscher ist inzwischen bei jeder fünften SAC-Hütte der Zustieg gefährdet. Nun wird eine Gebühr für Berggänger geprüft – zur Debatte steht aber auch eine andere Lösung.
Der Landschreiber Hans Schriber hat den späteren Schweizer Nationalmythos Wilhelm Tell um 1470 in seinem «Weissen Buch von Sarnen» begründet.