With Microsoft ready to ship Windows 10 on July 29, PC makers are disclosing their plans to make the OS available to customers in new laptops and desktops or as a free OS upgrade from Windows 7 and 8.1.Dell will ship its first PCs pre-loaded with Windows 10 on July 29, said Raymond Wah, vice president of consumer product marketing at the company, during an interview at Computex on Tuesday.The company wants to roll out laptops and desktops as quickly as possible so back-to-school buyers can get hold of the new OS, Wah said. Microsoft is providing a free upgrade to Windows 10 from Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 for one year, which Dell plans to make a snap through customer support and tutorial videos.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Former venture capitalist Ellen Pao intends to file an appeal against a March decision in a sex discrimination lawsuit.A 12-person jury in a court in San Francisco had found that Pao’s lawsuit against former employer Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers failed on all four counts, including the main issue of whether gender had been a consideration in the decision by the venture capital firm not to promote her.The case has captured attention in the U.S. tech industry, where women are a minority. Pao had also charged with discrimination an old and reputed firm, which has invested in some key technology companies in the U.S. The lawsuit has emerged as a symbol of the struggle by women against alleged sexual discrimination in the workplace.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft has acquired 6Wunderkinder GmbH, a German startup that makes the popular Wunderlist to-do list application, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.The deal was worth between $100 and $200 million, and is the latest in a string of acquisitions from the Redmond company aimed at bolstering its cross-platform holdings in the mobile productivity space. 6Wunderkinder’s staff will continue to work out of the firm’s Berlin office, but will report to Microsoft’s headquarters in Washington. The report squares with an earlier article from VentureBeat, which said the deal would be valued below $250 million.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
SanDisk, known for thumb drives, memory cards and internal SSD, has announced its first line-up of pocket-sized, high-capacity external drives.The new line of drives includes four products of varying size, ranging in capacity from 120GB to 1.9TB. The new line includes the Extreme 900 Portable SSD, which uses the new, reversible USB Type-C connector with throughput up to 850MB/s.All of the drives come native with SanDisk SecureAccess software, which uses 128-bit AES encryption to password protect data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
You know it well by now: Windows Server 2003 support is ending July 14, 2015. If you're one of the (far too) many still running WS2003, it's time to arm yourself with your action plan because what you don't know can hurt you.ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: What if Windows went open source tomorrow?
With help from the IDG Answers community, we collected some of most burning questions enterprises and individuals have about WS2003 end of support -- how it will affect them, how to prepare, what the options are. If you have advice you'd like to share, or lingering questions, add a comment below or join the discussion on IDG Answers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Xbox cofounder Otto Berkes may have spent the bulk of his recent years focusing on consumer technology, but his next career move will be set squarely in the enterprise arena, as CA Technologies on Monday announced that it recruited him to serve as its next CTO.Most recently, Berkes was CTO at HBO, where he was responsible for the development of HBO Go as well as all of the company’s technology efforts including media production, internal business systems and technology operations.Before that, Berkes—who has been awarded seven patents and is one of the four original founders of Xbox—spent 18 years at Microsoft, where he held a number of senior-level positions including senior software developer, partner-level architect and general manager.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Enterprise storage is a long-term bet. Pure Storage, a growing maker of all-flash arrays, is reshuffling the deck on that gamble in a way that might save IT departments time and money.Pure’s plan is to let customers keep the same system for a decade, upgrading various components as improved versions come out but never having to migrate the data from an older array to a new one. For some organizations, this could eliminate an expensive and time-consuming effort every few years.The elements of the new approach have been coming together for a while. But the company formally introduced the strategy and gave it a name—Evergreen Storage—as it unveiled its fourth-generation product on Monday. Evergreen Storage applies to all generations of Pure hardware already shipped as well as versions yet to come.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Pursuing opportunities in the Internet of Things market, Intel has sealed a deal to buy Altera in an all-cash transaction valued at about $16.7 billion, which would be Intel’s largest acquisition ever.News reports that the companies were in talks first surfaced in late March. However, those negotiations reportedly broke down in early April because Altera considered Intel’s offer of $54 per share too low.However, late last week the New York Post and other media outlets reported that talks had resumed after Altera reported disappointing financial results on April 23. Those reports were based on anonymous sources. The price of the final deal remains $54 per share.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Chip maker Mediatek is preparing to enter the laptop business, with the first Chromebooks based on its processors due to appear soon.So said Mediatek senior vice president Jeffrey Ju at the Computex trade show in Taipei. The company also showed a non-working Chromebook with its 64-bit MT8173 quad-core processor and a USB Type-C port.Ju didn’t say exactly when PC makers will release Chromebooks with MediaTek’s chips, but another MediaTek representative said the laptops could appear in the second half of this year or early next year.Chromebooks, which run Google’s Chrome OS, are catching on as a low-cost alternative to Windows PCs for users who do most of their computing on the Internet. The usage model is much like tablets and smartphones, with most applications requiring an Internet connection, though Google is making more offline applications available.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
So what do we have here?First of all, I cannot vouch for the authenticity of this photograph. I received it via the Twitter account for YouHadOneJob, @_youhadonejob. There are several other versions floating around. It could be a fake.
But let’s assume it’s real. What could account for the decision of the projector installer?Perhaps it could be that the projector needed to be installed a precise distance from the screen and therefore no other variable, such as proximity to the blades of a ceiling fan, could alter that requirement. In other words, the projector installer simply had no choice.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Arista NavigatorKey features: software tool designed for supporting Arista network infrastructures. The Arista Navigator reduces troubleshooting analysis time by visually providing intelligent access to Arista information. More info. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft will start shipping Windows 10 on July 29 for PCs and tablets. The upgrade includes the Cortana digital assistant, a whole host of new apps and the return of the start menu.After the failure of Windows 8, Microsoft has a lot to prove with the latest version of its operating system. The launch date puts pressure on Microsoft’s developers to finalize the feature-set and the look of the operating system. On Friday, the company released the latest version, dubbed Build 10130, which has new icons, Cortana improvements and some changes to the Start menu.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
VMware 6 pays more attention to high availability and large deployment than prior editions—with a kick to the throttle in terms of overall speed of scale, not just size of scale. This comes with a mixture of incremental upgrades, and a bit of administrative thoughtfulness.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
VMware's vSphere 6 pays more attention to high availability and large deployment than prior editions—with a kick to the throttle in terms of overall speed of scale, not just size of scale. This comes with a mixture of incremental upgrades, and a bit of administrative thoughtfulness.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
ARM is trying to resolve the thorny problem of battery life in Internet of Things devices with a new chip design that will significantly reduce the power consumed by processors, sensors and wireless chips.The company has overhauled the way it designs low-power Cortex-M chips that go into IoT devices such as health monitors, smart home devices and sensors. The restructured design could almost double battery life, ARM executives said at Computex in Taipei on Monday.For example, the battery life of a connected hearing aid could more than double with chips based on the new design, said Jeff Chu, director of marketing at ARM.Chu provided another example of a smart lightbulb lasting a lot longer on a battery charge with new chips based on the design. The smart bulb could have solar cells to refresh the battery, and the chip’s lower power consumption could help the battery last for years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Nvidia is bringing its G-Sync desktop display technology to laptops, which should lead to dramatic improvements in gaming for portable PCs.Nvidia’s G-Sync technology synchronizes monitors and display panels to the refresh rate of games, which reduces stutter and lag time. With G-Sync, GPUs are connected directly to displays, so images of a game appear almost instantly on a monitor as they are drawn up on a computer.As a result, games can run at more frames per second, improving the overall experience. The instantaneous refresh of screens also resolves the age-old problem of conventional monitors and displays being a bottleneck in the gaming experience.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Developers creating content for Google’s Cardboard virtual-reality system should look to short online videos for inspiration and avoid drawn-out experiences.Content for Cardboard should be “snackable virtual reality,” said Jon Wiley, the product’s principal designer, during the I/O developer conference on Friday.“For Cardboard, you want [an experience] to be more like traditional YouTube content,” he said, adding that Google’s VR platform isn’t really designed for “long duration experiences.”Google sees Cardboard as a device that friends can pass around to get a feel for what VR is all about, said Manuel Clement , a user experience designer on Google’s virtual reality team. In that context, shorter content would work better.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intel and Altera are apparently once again on speaking terms and said to be nearing a deal in which Intel would buy the smaller chip maker for US$15 billion.News of a possible deal first surfaced in media reports in late March, but those negotiations broke down after Altera supposedly rejected a bid of $54 per share from Intel in early April.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Acer CEO Jason Chen wants his company to be the “last PC maker standing,” he said last month, and on Friday the company continued to rain blows on its competitors with a flurry of new laptops and desktops running Windows and Chrome.It will show the new PCs at Computex next week—little more than a month after it held a big event in New York City’s World Trade Center to unveil dozens of other new laptops, desktops and gaming products.Perhaps the most interesting of the latest batch is the Aspire Switch 11 V laptop-tablet hybrid. The 11-inch full HD screen can detach from a keyboard base to become a tablet. The device has a Core M processor and offers up to eight hours of battery life. It has a Gorilla Glass screen, which gives it a higher level of protection in case of a fall. Acer hasn’t said when it will ship, or at what price, but its premium features could make it more costly than other Switch products, which start around US$200 for a 10-inch screen.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
More Windows devices with Intel’s Atom chips code-named Cherry Trail were announced this week, giving the Microsoft OS an early lead over Android, which is not yet in any tablet based on the new chips.Acer said Friday it would launch a new Switch tablet-laptop hybrid with a 10-inch detachable screen later this year. Earlier this week, Lenovo announced the new ThinkPad 10 with Cherry Trail chips.Intel officially announced Cherry Trail earlier this year, and the chips are designed to work with Windows and Android tablets. Microsoft’s Surface 3, which started shipping earlier this month, is the only tablet available with Cherry Trail. More Cherry Trail tablets are expected to be shown by little-known tablet makers at the Computex trade show next week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here