Computing

Adobe Crowds Its Cloud, Says Buh-Bye to Boxed Software
May 07, 2013

Adobe announced major changes to its business model this week and revealed that from now on, it will sell its software via a monthly subscription plan and forgo boxed software and perpetual licenses. The maker of popular creative software such as Photoshop and InDesign unveiled the new policy at its MAX conference this week.

HP Goes to Work With New ProBooks for SMBs
May 07, 2013

HP, facing difficulties in its desktop and laptop sales, on Monday unveiled two new series in its ProBook notebook computer line for small and medium businesses. The ProBook 400 series has five laptops with screen sizes ranging from 13.3 to 17.3 inches that are up to 36 percent thinner and 18 percent lighter than previous notebooks.

Federal Workers Lead Telecommuting Upsurge
May 07, 2013

U.S. government employees led a big jump in the use of technology to work from home or other locations, instead of their normal offices, during an annual telecommuting exercise in March. For employers and vendors, the message seems clear that the market for telework and mobile workplace equipment and software has only one way to go -- up.

Scan of Entire Internet Reveals Too Many Leaky Devices
May 06, 2013

There are 3.7 billion IP addresses on the Internet, and HD Moore has pinged every one of them. Moore is chief security officer at Rapid7, a cyberthreat and risk management company. In February, he decided as a hobby project to conduct a census of all the devices connected to the Internet, using a nest of computers in a spare room in his home.

New IT Tools Untie Tangled Webs of Business Data
May 06, 2013

Information may indeed be power, but organizations large and small are finding that they have to expend more energy than ever just to keep up with the data streams flooding their infrastructures. It's not just the internal data that provides intelligence about their businesses. Organizations are also having to manage all that external Big Data that can help them land new customers.

Years Inside Intel Could Be New CEO's Biggest Handicap
May 03, 2013

Intel announced Thursday that COO Brian Krzanich will take the helm on May 16, replacing current CEO Paul Otellini, who will retire this month after 38 years with the company, eight of them as its chief. Krzanich has his own long history at Intel. The 52-year-old joined the company 31 years ago as a newly minted college graduate.

Intel Focuses Iris GPUs on Gaming, Video
May 02, 2013

Intel on Thursday announced the Iris family of graphics processor units for its forthcoming Haswell line of processors. The Iris family offers up to double the 3D performance of the chip giant's fastest mobile HD graphics solutions on its processors for laptops and Ultrabooks. It also triples the 3D performance for its R-series processors for desktops.

World's Smallest Movie Is IBM's Science Blockbuster
May 01, 2013

IBM has released the world's smallest movie. Company researchers moved thousands of atoms to create a miniature stop-motion movie titled A Boy and His Atom.. The movie, which has 242 frames, was made with a scanning tunneling microscope which IBM has been using to conduct research into storage. The movie has been certified as the world's smallest by the Guinness World Records.

All Things Appy: Top 5 Android Camera Apps
May 01, 2013

As the geek world drools over the first 13-megapixel smartphone camera -- the Android-driven Samsung Galaxy S4 -- we take a look at the current state-of-play in the must-have camera app genre for Android. Ready, set, go. Occasionally an app comes along that blows everything else away.

Expect Labs' Anticipatory Computing Draws A-List Support
May 01, 2013

The investment arms of Intel and Samsung have sunk money into Expect Labs, which has developed a new class of technologies that can understand the meaning of continuous conversations in real-time, and can leverage that to proactively serve up information users may need. The support will be used to enable new types of context-aware, predictive intelligence in a variety of devices.

IBM Builds Traffic Cop for Internet of Things
April 30, 2013

IBM on Monday launched MessageSight, an appliance designed to handle machine-to-machine communications of the future. Such communications will develop exponentially to create what's known as the "Internet of Things." In announcing MessageSight, IBM cited a 2010 report that predicted more than 22 billion Web-connected devices by 2020, which will generate more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of new data daily.

Digging Into Garden Planning Software
April 30, 2013

When Catherine Kasper Place in Fort Wayne, Ind., needed to help refugees plan garden plots for themselves and for the organization's community supported agriculture, it turned to GrowVeg.com's Garden Planner and its affiliated iPad app, Garden Plan Pro. "It's challenging just to manage one garden," said Holly Chaille, Catherine Kasper Place's director. "This is 36 different ones, with 36 different designs."

What Happens When Android Fails?
April 29, 2013

I've just finished doing yet another news program on the increasing risks of using an Android phone, and the discussions have started to drift to the potential for class-action lawsuits, commercial plane crashes, and cyberdisasters that would make 9/11 seem trivial -- all connected to this platform.

FOSS Fact or Fiction? A Tale of Two Surveys
April 29, 2013

It's a well-known fact that statistics can be manipulated to suit virtually every occasion and purpose, but every once in a while an example comes along that illustrates that rule with breathtaking clarity. Case in point? Two recent surveys on the topic of FOSS that came out in the very same week.

Wanted in Healthcare: More Wireless Devices for In-Home Patients
April 27, 2013

The machine-to-machine communications industry is undergoing a period of fundamental change and significant growth. Encouraged by declining chipset and sensor costs, manufacturers are increasingly embedding their products with wireless connectivity. Mobile operators and key players in industries as diverse as automotive, oil and gas, and healthcare all have a strong interest in pursuing this growing market.

LinkedIn Bundles a Personal Assistant Into New Contacts App
April 26, 2013

LinkedIn unveiled a new contacts application for Web and mobile users this week with the goal of helping members manage the relationships they build on the professional social network. The company is billing LinkedIn Contacts as a digital personal assistant. It will pull information from user address books, calendars, emails and previous LinkedIn activity to create a single virtual Rolodex.

Ubuntu 13.04 Emerges to Less-Than-Stellar Reviews
April 26, 2013

Canonical has released Ubuntu 13.04, also known as "Raring Ringtail," on the desktop. However, the release failed to thrill many reviewers, whose complaints included the point that Canonical had left out several features, including privacy protection and the Windows-based Ubuntu Installer.

Have Linux Distros Gotten Too Tubby?
April 25, 2013

The size of Linux's waistline has long been the focus of recurring attention here in the Linux blogosphere, even drawing occasional criticism from Linus Torvalds himself. Recently, however, a fresh weight-related complaint was made -- not about the kernel itself, but about today's Linux distros.

BitTorrent Sync Flies Around the Cloud
April 24, 2013

The peer-to-peer technology company BitTorrent this week introduced the alpha version of BitTorrent Sync, a service that will let people sync and transfer files between multiple devices. "There are no file size limits, and the speed of transfer is only limited by your Internet connection," said Brett Nishi, director of product management at BitTorrent.

All Things Appy: 5 Best Windows 8 Sports Apps
April 24, 2013

You can do a whole lot more than watch your favorite sports on television these days if you take advantage of a second screen. The concept is simple: The big TV screen provides the visual action, while your laptop or tablet dishes out in-depth analysis and social media commentary on the side. Windows 8 has some superb apps for this purpose.