TechEye |  |
- Nokia readies Abu Dhabi tablet launches
- Microsoft messes up Windows RT 8.1 update
- Microsoft board plots revolt against Gates
- Snowden stopped us using drones
- It's back to the good old Crays
- Microsoft Office is still king of the castle
| Nokia readies Abu Dhabi tablet launches Posted: 21 Oct 2013 04:27 AM PDT Microsoft subsidiary Nokia will introduce six products at a conference in Abu Dhabi in a bit to spoil Apple’s expected launch of an iPad tomorrow. |
| Microsoft messes up Windows RT 8.1 update Posted: 21 Oct 2013 03:13 AM PDT Security expert Graham Cluley has revealed that Microsoft’s Windows 8.1 update for RT tablets is a total balls up, He said that any users of the Windows RT tablet should not waste any of their time trying to update. Vole has been forced to halt downloads of Windows RT 8.1 operating system, after users experienced an what the firm described as a “situation” with the free update. Fortunately for Microsoft there are not many people with a Windows RT tablet and those who have it, have not really thought about updating it. This morning Microsoft announced that it is investigating a situation affecting a limited number of users updating their Windows RT devices to Windows RT 8.1. It has temporarily removed the Windows RT 8.1 update from the Windows Store and is trying to resolve the situation as quickly as possible. According to Cluley. the upgrade appears to be making Windows RT devices blue screen on reboot. He said that the problem only affects the Windows RT-flavoured 8.1 update, rather than the regular version. And in comparison to the standard version of Windows 8 which runs on regular computers, hardly anyone has bought a Windows RT tablet. “Maybe it’s a good thing that Windows RT and Microsoft’s Surface tablets which run the operating system have been such a flop with customers – or many more people would potentially have been impacted by this flaw,” Cluley said. |
| Microsoft board plots revolt against Gates Posted: 21 Oct 2013 02:23 AM PDT A small group of Microsoft directors is planning a coup against the company founder Bill Gates in what looks like a reprise of the god-awful flick Valkyrie. Three unnamed members of Microsoft's board have been identified by press as being concerned that chairman Gates is not forward-thinking enough anymore and Vole will lose the war if he is not removed. According to the Guardian, the investors own more shares than Gate's five percent and they think Vole has become too big for Gates to handle. It is believed that they are the ones who agitated for the removal of the shy and retiring Steve Ballmer. They want to see someone like Alan Mulally who is the current CEO of Ford in charge at Vole, while others have thought that Stephen Elop, the chief executive of Nokia might be a good starter. The feeling is that Gates is not creative enough to take Microsoft into a new generation of computing. Normally he would have enough power within the company to tell the three board members to go forth and multiply, but he has been gradually selling his shares in the company and is projected to no longer have stock in another four years. So while operation Valkyrie ended up with Tom Cruise shot by a firing squad, the three board members will eventually win. It is just a matter of time before they have enough power to send Gates to rescue more Africans from life threatening illnesses. |
| Snowden stopped us using drones Posted: 21 Oct 2013 02:21 AM PDT Leaks about US government surveillance by Edward Snowden have killed off the ability for coppers to use powerful new technologies such as drones and mobile license plate readers. According to Reuters, top cop Vernon Keenan moaned to the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference and said that the disclosures, including monitoring of phone records, threaten to erode existing authority to use high-tech gear. Keenan said that while the NSA was getting a good kicking from the press, that scrutiny filtered down to ordinary cops who just want to lock up ordinary criminals. For many new technologies, there is no clear legal standard to govern their use, Keenan said and if people are not careful law enforcement will lose the use of technology. Coppers wanted things like advanced facial recognition software, mobile licence plate readers and unmanned aircraft. Philadelphia Police Chief Charles Ramsey told the conference that such advances will be "both the benefactor and the curse of policing". He said it is important to remember that just because police have the technology to do something does not mean they have to do it. |
| It's back to the good old Crays Posted: 21 Oct 2013 01:58 AM PDT The development of Big Data has been a money spinner for the much written off Cray Computer. Cray was a big name in the 1970s when you wanted a computer the size of an office block to run your payroll. However, it disappeared into the background 20 years ago with the rise of the PC. According to Reuters, Cray is surging back to prominence. Its shares have almost doubled over the last year. The reason is that the explosion of data and the need to work out what it all means demands greater computing power. Barry Bolding, a Cray vice president, at the company's Seattle headquarters, said that five years ago people thought they could run simulations on a laptop. That might have been true at the time, but now raw data is being created in exabytes. More data means a bigger computer, a bigger computer means more data, he said More than 2.5 exabytes of data are now generated every day, and the world's capacity to store that data is doubling every 40 months, which all plays to Cray's cunning plans. Cray cabinets cost $500,000 and some of the bigger customers can group 200 or more into massive supercomputers worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Titan, completed by Cray last year, is the world's third-fastest supercomputer, takes up the size of a basketball court and can perform more than 20,000 trillion calculations a second. Cray has 900 employees and a market value of around $940 million, has changed ownership several times and in June it nicked long term IBM customer the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Wall Street analysts are expecting revenue of $519 million this year, up 23 percent from 2012, with a gross profit margin around 34 percent. |
| Microsoft Office is still king of the castle Posted: 21 Oct 2013 01:52 AM PDT It looks like hopes that open sauce, or cloud based alternatives might kill off Microsoft Office were completely unfounded. Beancounters at Forrester have been adding up the numbers and dividing by their shoe size and come up with a report which claims that Vole Office is the most preferred productivity suite by a huge margin. It conducted a survey with 155 clients about productivity suites which were used in their offices. Vole Office is the most used productivity software among the companies, with Office 2010 used by nearly 85 per cent of the companies, while Office 2013 being adopted gradually as Windows 8 is rolled out. Vole wants to make sure that Office works on every platform including the cloud to combat any attempts by Google to muscle in on its market. Microsoft recently launched Office for Android and iPhone, for Office 365 subscribers. This might not be necessary. The report the majority of IT decision makers don't consider multi-platform support a priority and are satisfied with Office on Windows at work. The report is bad news for open-source suites such as OpenOffice and LibreOffice which started off so well. However, they failed to gain market share after initial eagerness from companies to adopt those softwares. In 2011 the software packages had 11 per cent of the market, and now just have four per cent. Google Docs has significantly lower usage compared to Microsoft Office and many users are planning to move to Office 365. This is more or less what Microsoft has been trying to tell the world since September, but few believed it. Office 365 has been doing well with the Home Premium version recently crossing two million subscribers and a $1.5 billion annual run-rate. What the figures confirm is that Microsoft is still the king of Office software and nothing has managed to shift it. |
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