Microsoft has issued fixes to the problem plaguing its Anniversary Update, aka Redstone, a major update to Windows 10 issued this past August. The fixes are available via the Windows Update utility.The Anniversary Update was an ambitious update, far more than a mere patch, so problems are not too big of a surprise. However, issues quickly piled up in this instance. Almost immediately there were reports of login issues, a bug causing webcams to fail, and Kindle's causing the PC to crash when the Kindle was plugged into the PC via USB.The big one, though, was freezing and slowdowns on the PC after installing the Anniversary Update. It took Microsoft roughly a month to figure out the problem, but users can now apply a Windows Update, which was released Aug. 31, to alleviate the problem. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The tablet market has declined over the past year, and trend will continue through the end of the year, according to recent data from IDC.Sales of tablets and hybrids fell 11.5 percent, with an all-time year-over-year low of just 183.4 million units sold. But IDC is optimistic about the future, predicting "positive growth" in 2018 that will continue to rise over the following two years, potentially reaching 194.2 million units sold by 2020.The future is hybrid
Hybrid devices like the iPad Pro and Surface Pro 4 are shaping the market, and pushing innovation from other tech companies as they try to keep pace. The market has already seen a slew of enterprise-ready hybrids, and if IDC's data suggests that the popularity of these devices will only grow in the coming years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In my last blog, I wrote about what I was anticipating as far as cybersecurity for VMworld. Now that I’m back from Vegas, it’s time for me to report on how reality aligned with my expectations.1. NSX penetration. It seems like VMware has made progress in terms of NSX market penetration over the past year. At VMworld 2015, VMware talked about around 1,000 production environments for NSX while at VMworld 2016, VMware mentioned somewhere between 1,700 to 2,000 production NSX customers. Still a small percentage of the total VMware installed base but at least 70% growth year-over-year. Yes, some of these customers are likely just getting started or are using NSX on an extremely limited basis, but I still see good progress happening as more and more organizations begin playing with and using NSX. VMware describes three primary uses for NSX: Disaster recovery, security, and network operations automation. It is worth noting that around 60% to 70% of NSX deployment is skewed toward security use cases. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Twenty years ago, Frank Azor and three other Alienware founders built and sold their first gaming PCs. Gaming was a niche market at the time, but two decades later, it's booming.Virtual reality occupies a similar space as gaming for Azor, who is general manager for Alienware and XPS products at Dell. For him, VR is the future of PCs and will be as hot as gaming. Though full of promise, VR is still raw, however.VR is important for Dell, but Azor doesn't want to rush in and then regret it. He's taking a measured approach to evaluating VR because problems with headsets and user experiences have yet to be resolved."There's so much to learn still. We don't want to be haphazard about jumping in and doing something careless and making some mistake," Azor said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Five years after a security breach forced the Linux Foundation to take kernel.org offline and to rebuild several of its servers, police have arrested a suspect in the case.Donald Ryan Austin, a 27-year-old computer programmer from El Portal, Florida, was arrested during a traffic stop on Aug. 28 based on a sealed indictment returned by a federal grand jury in the Northern District of California in June.Austin is charged with intentionally damaging four protected servers operated by the Linux Foundation and one of its members in 2011. More specifically, the programmer is accused to have installed rootkit and trojan software on the servers in order to steal the credentials of authorized users connecting to them via SSH (Secure Shell).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.Most CISOs receive a rude awakening when they encounter their first major security issue in the cloud. If they identify a critical vulnerability that requires a patch, they may not have the authorization to tweak the cloud provider's pre-packaged stack. And if the customer does not own the network, there may not be a way to access details that are critical to investigating an incident.In order to avoid a major security issue in the cloud, CISO’s must have an incident response plan. Here is how to build one:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple yesterday issued an emergency security update for the Mac, patching the same trio of vulnerabilities the company fixed last week on the iPhone.
According to one of the groups that first revealed the flaws, the vulnerabilities could have been "weaponized" for use against OS X, the Mac's operating system.
The out-of-band update was aimed at OS X El Capitan (aka 10.11) and Yosemite (10.10), the 2015 and 2014 editions, respectively. Older versions, including 2014's OS X Mavericks, went unpatched: Apple is nearing the release of its annual Mac operating system upgrade and thus the end of support for the edition of three years ago.
Like the urgent update Apple released last week for the iPhone -- iOS 9.3.5 -- the Mac patches quash three bugs, two in the operating system's kernel and the third in the Safari browser.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When whistleblower Edward Snowden shocked the world in 2013 by revealing that the NSA was allegedly siphoning data from U.S. internet companies, pundits proclaimed that winter was coming for American cloud vendors in Europe. Evidence now suggests those fears may have been overblown.IDC said this month that U.S. cloud vendors have increased their combined cloud infrastructure revenue two-and-a-half-times in Western Europe, topping $2 billion since the Snowden Effect was supposed to freeze the market. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Alphabet’s Google and IBM increased their market share by a third in the region, hitting 40 percent in 2015.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Expecting people to figure out what its Cookie multipurpose smart sensors could be used for didn't work out so well for Sen.se. It's trying a different approach with its new Peanut sensors: application-specific packaging that sells the purpose, not the product.The first Peanut, launched Thursday, is a thermometer presented as a way to get alerts if a child's room gets too cold or a refrigerator too hot.Future Peanuts, all in the same 7.5-gram, 45 x 25 x 5 millimeter case, will contain different sensors and be packaged as an alarm clock/sleep monitor (SleepPeanut), a medication reminder (MedPeanut), or a remote control (PeanutButton). Sen.se plans to release a new reason to connect things to the internet every six weeks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is said to be looking to sell its software division, which would include the business from its disastrous acquisition of Autonomy in 2011, according to news reports.The enterprise IT company that emerged from the breakup of Hewlett-Packard has been restructuring its operations recently, including a US$8.5 billion deal announced in May to spin off and merge its enterprise services business with CSC. A sale of the software business would leave the company focused largely on servers, networking, storage, business critical systems and technology services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Siege lantern from Streamlight is sturdy, rugged and well-built. It's rated 5 out of 5 stars from over 1,400 people on Amazon (read reviews) and its typical list price of $62.42 has been reduced 49% to just $31.99. The Siege Lantern distributes light 360-degrees. It features four C4 power LEDs for extreme brightness, and one red C4 power LED to preserve night vision. There are five output modes, and a battery level indicator built into the on/off button. Its ergonomic handle makes it easy to carry, while allowing it to hook on any edge or bar. With the outer lantern globe in place, the light is water-resistent and will float. Remove the outer globe, and the lantern's body's ready to hang upside down by the D-ring for large area lighting needs. Low white light mode provides extended run time of 295 hours. Battery replacement is a breeze with the center-post orienting the battery cover correctly every time. See the highly rated and discounted Streamlight Siege lantern now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The goal of technology is to make the world a better place. Sometimes, you can do that by making a gigantic breakthrough that solves a big problem in one fell swoop or opens major new horizons to the whole of humanity.Much more often, however, you can solve a much smaller problem right at home. That’s what Makoto Koite, a cucumber farmer in Japan, did when he used Google’s open-source AI software TensorFlow, an Arduino, and a Raspberry Pi to automatically sort his produce by size and shape.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Big data salaries set to rise in 2017 + Why these victims decided not to pay the ransomTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft's browsers continued to hemorrhage users last month, with no sign that the bleeding will stop.According to Internet analytics vendor Net Applications, the combined user share of Internet Explorer and Edge fell 2.2 percentage points in August, ending the month at 32.5%. It was the fourth month in the last six where IE + Edge lost more than 2 points, and the second-largest decline in the 11-year history of Computerworld's recording of Net Applications' data.The brutal erosion of Microsoft's browser share has been unprecedented, rivaled only by the plunge of Netscape Navigator, which Internet Explorer dethroned in the second half of the 1990s. In the past six months, IE has lost more than 12 percentage points of user share; since the first of the year, IE has shed 16 points.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Growth in smartphones will only reach 1.6% for all of 2016, mainly because of sales declines in developed markets like the U.S., Japan and Western Europe, IDC predicted Thursday.The analyst firm also said that iPhone shipments for the entire year will decline by 12% globally compared to 2015, while Windows Phone shipments will decline by 75%. Sales of Android smartphones produced by a number of manufacturers will increase by 6.7%, and grab 85% of the global market for all of 2016.The iPhone decline was partly attributed to Apple customers waiting to purchase the next-generation iPhone, IDC said. That phone, probably in a couple of sizes, is widely expected to be announced along with an upgraded Apple Watch at an event next Wednesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The European Commission's decision to force Apple to pay Ireland billions of dollars in back taxes is "total political crap" and a reflection of anti-U.S. sentiment, company CEO Tim Cook told the Irish Independent in an interview published Thursday."No one did anything wrong here," Cook said. "Ireland is being picked on, and this is unacceptable."The EC ruled on Tuesday that Ireland gave Apple illegal tax benefits by not collecting €13 billion (US$14.5 billion) in taxes owed to it over a 10-year period. It was the culmination of a two-year investigation into the company's tax affairs that found Apple's effective tax rate on profit reported in Ireland was just €500 per million euros in profit, falling to €50 per million in 2014.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Although Windows 10's growth slowed in August, the one-year-old operating system didn't slam on the brakes as expected, according to data from multiple analytics sources.The smaller-than-anticipated slowdown may signal the start of enterprise deployments, a move that would vindicate Microsoft's efforts to nudge businesses to adopt the OS faster than they had earlier editions.According to U.S.-based metrics vendor Net Applications, Windows 10 gained 1.9 percentage points of user share during August, putting its mark at 23% of all personal computers for the month.INSIDER Review: Enterprise guide to Windows 10
Windows 10 powered 25.4% of all machines running Windows: The difference between the user share of all PCs and only those running Windows stemmed from the fact that Windows powered 90.5% of all personal computers, not 100%.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple’s absence in the virtual reality (VR) market could be lethal. Mobile VR is going to sell expensive top-tier phones. And without a dog in the fight, Apple will cede mobile VR to Google’s Android.Recent activity leads me to believe, however, that an Apple/Oculus partnership could be announced at Apple’s Sept. 7 media event. Here are 10 reasons why I think it could really happen:1. UploadVR reported that Apple filed a patent on a head-mounted display (HMD)Apple filed a patent on an HMD and hand trackers similar to what are being sold today. It’s likely a defensive patent to prevent a damages award in patent litigation with the innovators such as Oculus, HTC and their predecessors. Apple’s claim in its patent reads: “A head-mounted device that is worn on a user's head and configured to integrate with a cellular telephone…”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Protect your home theatre equipment, computers, and other expensive equipment with Tripp Lite's TLP1208SAT surge suppressor. This highly rated model has 12 outlets, an 8-foot cord with space-saving right-angle plugs, and diagnostic LEDs. The unit has a surge suppression rating of 2880 joules to handle the strongest surges. Built-in RJ11, RJ45, and Type F coax jacks prevent surges from damaging your modem/fax/cable/satellite equipment. Coaxial jacks provide digital broadband quality and can handle 2.2 GHz bandwidth. 8 outlets are regularly spaced, while 4 are widely spaced transformer outlets with safety covers. 4 keyhole mounting slots included as well. The TLP1208SAT averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from 700 people (read reviews) and its list price of $39.59 has been reduced to $30.54.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
See the cool laptops and 2-in-1s introduced at IFAAn impressive array of 2-and-1s and laptops were shown at this year's IFA show in Berlin. A common thread was innovation; devices with boom-or-bust features stood out. Sleeker laptops and 2-in-1s used Intel's latest Kaby Lake chips, which were launched just ahead of the show. Feast your eyes on our selection of IFA's best PCs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
On a road trip, camping, or during a power outage or emergency, this adapter plugs into your vehicle's power socket and, more or less, mimics a household wall power outlet. The fanless inverter quietly and safely delivers 100 watts of continuous power to your laptop, fan, DVD player, musical instrument, video game system and much more (just be mindful of the wattage requirements on your device). Dual USB ports are built-in, and with a max power output of 2.1A, the power inverter is also ideal for charging your iPhones, iPods, iPads, tablets, Samsung Galaxy, and other mobile phones or USB powered devices. Currently averaging 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 580 people on Amazon (read reviews), its typical list price of $29.99 has been reduced 33% to $19.99. See the discounted Energizer 100W power inverter now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here