Pablos Holman sees a day not too far off when our diets will be tailored to our metabolisms, adding a few bits of broccoli, a smattering of beets, and some meat—all extruded from a 3D printer in an appetizing form to please our palates. Holman is a futurist and inventor at the Intellectual Ventures Laboratory in Bellevue, Washington, where he and others work on futuristic projects like printable food. He was not alone in speaking on the topic at the Inside 3D Printing Conference last week. Avi Reichentall, CEO of 3D Systems, one of the largest has already been able to configure his machines to create a variety of sugary goods, including cakes and candy. The sweets were on display with ornate designs. Reichentall said consumers can expect his company to build a machine that will take a place next to the coffee maker on a kitchen counter, but instead of a caffeine shot, it will offer a sugar rush.
Since introducing its own Microsoft has been redefining the PC to include devices that haven't been considered PCs before, and it's taken that trend one step further. In the , Microsoft Vice President of the Operating Systems Group Terry Myerson says that in emerging markets, the cellphone can be considered a PC. "In many cases, these customers are new to Microsoft, and their first personal computer will be a phone," Myerson says in the blog."These customers" are Nokia feature-phone owners who will be herded into the Microsoft tent when the agreement for Microsoft to buy the company goes through sometime next year. Meanwhile, Microsoft has taken over the blog. Myerson refers to Nokia's mobile phone business that includes a vast number of low-end phones running an operating system more than a decade old. These are not smartphones, but the company sells a lot of them. With the feature phones included in the count, 1.3 billion people use Nokia phones, the blog claims.
Microsoft executives last week came the closest yet to saying that the company will release Office on iPads and Android tablets, but stopped short of promising anything specific or setting a timetable. "We are working on touch-first versions for our core apps in the Office suite, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and we will bring these apps to Windows devices, and also to other devices in ways that meets our customers' needs, and the customer value of those experiences, and in ways that economically make sense for Microsoft, and at a proper timetable," said Qi Lu on Thursday in a heavily-qualified answer during the company's , a half-day event where Microsoft spoke to Wall Street analysts. Lu heads Microsoft's new Applications and Services Group, which is responsible for Office. Others chimed in, too, once the company selects a new chief executive.
The National Security Agency's director of information assurance said the "way to achieve confidence in cyberspace" is to increase collaboration between the government and the high-tech industry—remarks that rang ironic given former NSA contractor about how NSA works with industry. NSA documents leaked by Snowden showed that the NSA's goal is to build backdoors into commercial products and to make it easier for surveillance, allegations that the U.S. government has not even tried to refute. When asked about that today, NSA director of information assurance Debora Plunkett, who gave the keynote address at the New York Institute of Technology Cyber Security Conference in New York City, flatly refused to discuss the topic. But her keynote address was intended to get hardware and software vendors to work in ever-closer partnership with the NSA. Cyberattacks that could take electricity grids offline and disrupt transportation systems are possible, Plunkett said in her keynote, pointing out the destructive attack that hit last year and impacted data systems there. It's a simple matter to hire hacking services to carry out attacks such as denial-of-service, she said, and the fear now is of "integrity attacks" that would destroy or alter critical data. These are all "cyber security challenges," she noted, and the government today is largely dependent on commercial hardware and software for which the NSA itself cannot "provide indemnification." NSA's needs industry's help, she said.
Many tech companies are implementing green practices in manufacturing and development, but Facebook has an original approach: Using potatoes in its servers to make them more environmentally friendly. Under the of the OCP community so that they too can improve their own efficiencies and reduce the overall environmental impact of IT on the world. "We disposed of anything that wasn't useful," said Frank Frankovsky, Facebook's vice president of hardware design and supply chain operations, at a recent briefing in London. This included removing the top lids from its servers, but that resulted in a lack of airflow over the central processing unit (CPU), causing them to overheat.
Microsoft has expanded a buyback program intended to boost sales of Windows smartphones and tablets, and will for a wide variety of rival hardware powered by Apple's iOS and Google's Android. Stephen Baker, an analyst at the NPD Group who specializes in retail, applauded the deal. "This is clearly a marketing ploy, [but] they usually prove to be good programs for getting people into stores," Baker said. The new program followed an earlier, more limited buyback deal that with the funds placed on a gift card good for purchases at Microsoft's own retail stores. Microsoft's expanded buyback accepts numerous rival devices, including smartphones and tablets running Android made by the likes of Samsung, Lenovo and others; Apple iPhones and iPads; and even BlackBerry smartphones.
Linux kernel developer Sarah Sharp is searching for a solution to the problem posed by vampire mice, she said in a presentation at LinuxCon North America in New Orleans last week. "I don't mean the little fuzzy, furry ones," Sharp said. "I mean the ones that suck the life out of your battery." It's a longstanding problem with USB power management in A lack of device driver support for Linux means that the power-saving features used in many USB devices that enable your mouse to essentially turn itself off if you haven't moved it lately, for instance, are rendered ineffective or even made potentially damaging in some cases. One such issue affected a particular brand of portable USB hard drive. Sharp said that an alarming problem occurred when the drive attempted to come out of suspend mode.
Google Glass, Samsung Galaxy Gear, and the rumored Apple iWatch have turned up the hype-o-meter on to deafening levels. You'd think they were the only players in the game. But such powerful gadgetry isn't the future of wearables, only a part of it. At least that's the thinking from Christian DeFeo, e-supplier manager at Newark element14, an electronic design community for engineers and a component retailer. Instead of wearing $1500 Google Glasses that delivers a sci-fi experience, he says, you're more likely to slip on an affordable ring equipped with near-field communications (NFC) technology that unlocks your car door. "Google Glass is kind of an elite product that's only for a select few," because of the expected sky-high retail price, DeFeo says. "We see wearable technology being much more democratized than that." Unlike the Green Lantern's glowing superpower ring, the like Google Glass and smart watches.
Gartner projects downloads of mobile apps will exceed 102 billion this year, but most of them are free, not paid.
Symantec believes it has connected the dots to link a single Chinese hacking group dubbed "Hidden Lynx" to a series of high-profile APT-driven cyberattacks on U.S. interests, including the infamous Aurora hacks of 2009 as well as this year's compromise of security firm Bit9. The firm's that has become the media face of Chinese state-sponsored hacking. According to Symantec, since 2009 Hidden Lynx has targeted hundreds of organizations around the world, focusing more than half its effort on the U.S., with smaller campaigns against targets in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and even mainland China itself. This is a group that seems to do a bit of everything, picking off organizations in every sector with a particular interest in corporate espionage against finance, government, ICT, education, and healthcare.
Businesses with certain Microsoft memberships and service agreements can now download the near-final version of to test with an eye toward deployment, the company says. members as well as businesses with volume licensing and Software Assurance agreements can download the software. The to hardware vendors. "Testing your operating system for compatibility with existing applications and better understanding what needs to be done to migrate your business especially for those organizations still on Windows XP is paramount," says Erwin Visser, the general manager of Windows commercial marketing in the . He also encourages businesses with Windows 7 deployments to start testing, even though support for Windows 7 is not being ended as it is for XP.
A working group for Internet regulators is under severe criticism for a proposal that would put an end to the openness of the current WHOIS system for domain name registration records. The expert working group of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) of a legitimate need for the data. Currently, registrants store registration records, and anyone can go to a number of sites that use the and response protocol to retrieve all the public information. The working group agrees with critics that the system in use today provides too much inaccurate information, and fails to protect the privacy of individuals and entities with a legitimate right to keep the information out of the public domain. The question of balancing privacy and access has been raised before, as the issue.
That was good advice, and most people could easily remember the two or three passwords that they needed. and rather predictable passwords in order to be able to recall them. address this problem, but come with their own problems. What if malware breaks in and steals all the passwords? And what do you do—practically speaking—when you have a new or borrowed device? First of all, we should revisit the advice from the 1990s. Today, the typical adversary is not a colleague looking over your shoulder, but a faceless hacker thousands of miles away. Writing passwords down on pieces of paper may not be such a bad idea—although we still don’t recommend sticking them to your screen. This makes particular sense as the number of passwords grows.
A that impacts all versions of the browser is being actively exploited in the wild, Microsoft reports. Exploits seem to have focused on IE versions 8 and 9, according to Microsoft. But researchers at Websense have discovered that nearly 70 percent of Windows business users are susceptible to this IE zero-day exploit. "We reviewed third-party telemetry feeds from real-time global internet requests to determine the initial scope. While the exploit appears to affect all versions of IE, at the moment attacks only seem to be targeting users of IE8 and IE9 who are running Windows 7 and XP operating systems," Websense's director of security research, Alex Watson, said in a statement. According to the advisory, Microsoft said that IE installations running on Server 2003, 2008, and 2012 will mitigate the vulnerability due to its installation parameters. Experts have suggested that the scope of the problem is bad enough that Microsoft will likely release a fix outside of its usual patch schedule.
Google gives all comers 15 gigabytes' worth of free storage across Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Plus Photos. Not a bad chunk of space just for having a heartbeat. Of course, more is always better, especially when you don't have to pay for it. And Google is now offering exactly that, though there are a couple small catches. From now through Sept. 26, you have the opportunity to score an extra 10GB of Google Drive space, no extra charge. --which, incidentally, is also now free. Then sign into your Google account via that app. Presto! You get another 10GB of gratis storage.
Although originally built to develop enterprise Java apps, the NetBeans IDE (integrated development environment) is increasingly being rigged to help developers use the lighter weight HTML5 and JavaScript Web languages as well. , version 7.4, Oracle has outfitted the IDE with new tools to help build iOS and Android Web applications that use HTML5 and JavaScript, in addition to updating its core feature set for Java Enterprise Edition development as well. NetBeans IDE is Oracle's no-cost open source IDE for primarily designed for Java, though it includes robust support for the PHP and C/C++ languages as well. It is available for the Windows, Apple Macintosh, Oracle Solaris and Linux platforms.
Enterprise tech companies including Oracle this week started reporting financial results that cover at least part of the third calendar quarter, and so far, the trends look mildly promising compared to last quarter. For its fiscal quarter ending Aug. 31, Oracle reported revenue of $8.4 billion, up 2 percent year over year, and net income of $2.2 billion, up 8 percent. Sales of new software licenses and “engineered systems,” preconfigured hardware and software bundles like the company’s Exadata offering, helped boost results. One big question for Oracle is whether its cloud-based software will compete successfully against similar offerings from younger rivals such as Workday and Salesforce.com. Another issue is whether Oracle’s move into hardware, essentially a bet it made when it bought Sun Microsystems in 2010, will pan out or continue to be a drag on profit. Overall hardware system revenue decreased 7 percent to $1.23 billion in the quarter, Oracle said. However, engineered systems did well, officials said.
Very bad news for BlackBerry. The Canadian smartphone maker posted a $995 million operating loss for the second quarter and will cut 4500 jobs—over a third of its staff—in a bid to cut costs. The news comes moments after the company halted trading on its stock, which has been on a steady downward decline in the past several months. Recent BlackBerry phones, like the Z10 and Q10, failed to catch on with consumers, and BlackBerry has been fighting a losing battle against Microsoft for the number three spot in the mobile market. In light of the results, the company said it plans to restructure and lay off around 4500 staff and cut the number of phones it sells from six to four handsets. Those phones will be targeted at the enterprise and prosumer markets.
It’s been two months since Steve Ballmer unfurled his plan to restructure Microsoft’s operations, and inquiring minds would like to know what stage the process is at. In fact, he was asked just that on Thursday during the company’s meeting with Wall Street analysts, but Ballmer’s answer wasn’t entirely clear or specific. The analyst who brought up the subject asked whether the process was completed and, if it’s not, whether it would take several more quarters for all the pieces of the different teams to be in place and for everyone to know whom they report to. Ballmer answered that there are three layers to the implementation of the plan, although he didn’t explain what each layer involves.
The humorist-turned-politician sent an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook with a dozen questions on the privacy implications of Touch ID.
Valve launched a new webpage Friday which hints of an announcement for its Steam Box home console early next week.
Here's how to reset your crashed Android smartphone and restore it to factory default settings.
Here are 10 movies that got shafted but are well worth watching.
Microsoft is pursuing the ideal of OS platforms: a unified code base that runs from smartphones to servers, giving users a consistent experience across devices at home and at work, and developers a common tool set for building applications. “We really should have one silicon interface for all of our devices. We should have one set of developer APIs on all of our devices,” said Terry Myerson, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Operating Systems Engineering Group, during the company’s meeting with financial analysts on Thursday. “And all of the apps we bring to end users should be available on all of our devices,” he added. This is the ambitious goal Myerson’s team has been chasing since the Operating Systems Engineering Group was formed two months ago as part of a broad reorganization of the company.
It's like Chromecast, only more potent and five times the cost.
Dude, where's my processor for collecting background sensor data?
Sprint announced a new annual upgrade plan just in time for the new iPhones, and it's one of the best deals around.
Word-of-mouth has long been a driver of small business success (and failure), and these days it takes the form of online customer reviews. But the relative anonymity provided by the Web has added a new wrinkle: review fraud. using phony profiles. is trying to attack the fake review issue in a different way, allowing only people with names, faces, and legitimate social media profiles to post reviews. Doing so is free and merely involves signing in with a Facebook or LinkedIn login, then inviting friends and connections within those social networks and your address book to review a business. .
Spend your free time bending time with these fun, free, time-altering games.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer insinuated that the company is working on a version of Office for the iPad and for Android tablets when he addressed Wall Street analysts on Thursday. Speaking about “upside opportunities” that exist for Microsoft, Ballmer talked about porting products to non-Windows platforms. “We don’t have our heads in the sand,” he said during the company’s meeting with financial analysts, which was held in a Bellevue, Wash., convention center and webcast live. In this context Microsoft is “working on everything that you think we should be working on,” Ballmer said.