Microsoft posted a quick fix on New Year’s Day for the glitch that made some of its Zune digital music players freeze up the day before, thanks apparently to a leap-year problem encountered by the Zune’s internal clock. Since 2008 had an extra day, including February 29th, the calendar/clock on some Zunes got confused about when the new year was about to start.
Michael Gartenberg, VP of mobile strategy for Jupitermedia told NewsFactor.com he hasn’t “seen anything quite like this since the Y2K phenomenon,” referring to the problems that many feared would freeze computers when the clock advanced at midnight from 1999 to the year 2000. While millions were spent to upgrade computers and software in order to avert a Y2K virtual meltdown, the recent Zune freeze-up was, of course, much less significant.
“It doesn’t appear for most users that this was super-serious,” Gartenberg said. “If you waited until New Year’s Day to plug in your device and charge it back up, most users were fine.”
On the other hand, Gartenberg pointed out, it’s still embarrassing for Microsoft that the Zune would freeze up at all. The glitch, he said, shows a lack of quality control, and “it definitely is not the type of thing that enhances Microsoft’s reputation as a pioneer in consumer electronics.”
The Four-Step Fix
On its Zune Web site, Microsoft outlined four steps for owners of the frozen 30-gigabyte Zune players:
First, disconnect the Zune from its USB and AC power sources. Because the player is frozen, its battery will drain, which is a good thing.
Then, wait until the battery is empty and the screen goes black. If the battery was fully charged, this might take a couple of hours.
Wait until after noon GMT on January 1, 2009 — 7 a.m. Eastern or 4 a.m. Pacific time in the U.S. (now…
The latest data from Net Applications indicates that Internet Explorer lost market share in December to browsers from Mozilla and Apple.
According to the Web metrics provider, Microsoft’s browser market share has declined by more than six percent since February 2008. The browser held a 68.15 percent market share in December — its lowest in years.
By contrast, Mozilla Firefox’s market share rose one-half of a percentage point from November and has climbed more than four percent since February to reach 21.34 percent in December.
“Reaching 20 percent worldwide market share is a significant milestone for Firefox and Mozilla,” said Mozilla CEO John Lilly last month. “It’s a huge achievement by the global Mozilla community, one that just a few years ago most would have considered impossible.”
Mac Users Take Safari
Apple’s Safari browser has also been chipping away at Internet Explorer’s market share for months. Since February, Safari’s market share has grown more than two percent to a 7.93 percent share in December.
However, Safari’s rising market share is almost entirely due to the rising sales of Mac computers, which ship with Safari. According to Net Applications, the Mac operating system’s share of the computer market has risen 2.17 percent since February.
Even Google’s Chrome browser, which debuted in early September, exceeded one percent for the first time in December. Among the world’s top five Web browsers, only Opera appears to be going nowhere. Opera’s market share has hovered around the 0.7 percent mark since February.
Still, Net Applications warned that its reports for November and December should be eyed with caution.
“The December holiday season strongly favored residential over business usage,” said the Aliso Viejo, Calif., firm, which provides applications for Webmasters and e-marketers. “This, in turn, increases the relative usage share of Mac, Firefox, Safari and other products that have relatively high…
Apple secured a larger piece of the operating-system pie in December. Mac OS X, which hasn’t been a threat to Microsoft’s Windows operating systems in the past, is gaining traction.
The market share for Mac OS X rose nearly 10 percent last month, according to Net Applications, a research company based in Aliso Viejo, Calif., which tracts Internet browsers and operating systems.
In December, Apple’s Mac OS X had 9.63 percent of the market. While that’s not great in comparison to Microsoft’s 88.68 percent, it’s increasing.
In November, Mac OS X had an 8.9 percent market share. The increase is significant for Apple, which holds the number-two spot behind Microsoft, and a significant increase from 2007 when it had 7.3 percent.
Record Setting and Faster
Usage of Mac OS X was record-setting with a two-month increase during November and December. Those months’ combined gain of 1.4 percentage points was larger than Net Applications’ previous record, a 0.9 percentage point increase between September and October 2006, and nearly double the 0.73 percentage point increase between November and December 2007.
Just as Apple had a record-setting two months, Microsoft also had a record with the largest decrease in Windows usage in four years — as long as Net Application has been tracking operating systems. The decrease was also the second consecutive monthly loss for Microsoft. Windows ended the year down 3.1 percentage points, a 3.4 percent drop in its share from the same time in 2007.
Apple’s Mac OS X has been attracting more users because with each release it has become faster. Versions 10.0 through 10.4.11 have increased in speed with each new issue and didn’t require any additional hardware, according to Apple.
Apple also had more to cheer about as its iPhone 3G had a good month and year in terms of market…
Google’s Android App Market will begin selling applications early this year. Google had promised a way for developers to earn cash for their applications.
Apple’s App Store lets developers keep 70 percent of the revenue generated from application sales. RIM’s Blackberry Application Store promises to give developers 80 percent of the revenue when its store launches in March.
Google has been promising to add paid applications since its App Market debuted in October. Plans are to give developers 70 percent of the revenues. Google, however, will not keep the remaining 30 percent for itself. Rather, the company will use what’s left over to cover carriers and billing-settlement fees.
Google’s Official Statement
Mobile-application developer Martin Drashkov is one of many who reported receiving an e-mail from the Android Market on Tuesday. The e-mail from Eric Chu says:
“Android Market will support priced applications starting early Q1 2009, as we’d originally stated last fall. Given the country-by-country work required to set up payment support for developers in different countries, we will enable priced app support in Q1 for developers operating in these countries, in the following order: (1) United States and UK; (2) Germany, Austria and Netherlands; (3) France, Italy and Spain.”
Google said it will announce support for developers operating in additional countries by the end of the first quarter and urged developers in the supported countries to finish their applications, including determining the appropriate pricing strategy.
The Impact of Paid Apps
Michael Gartenberg, vice president of mobile strategy for Jupitermedia, is eager to see what types of apps show up at the Android Market now that there is an incentive for developers. “Up until now, there was no way to be compensated for your work,” he noted. “That’s fine for some folks, but not for many.”
It’s possible that the incentive could trigger a wave of Android applications. Developers…
Here’s the vacation no one wants, courtesy of the recession: Forced time off without pay.
Financially struggling American universities, factories and even hospitals are requiring employees to take unpaid “furloughs” — temporary layoffs that amount to one-time pay cuts for workers and a cost savings for employers. This year, the number of temporarily laid off workers hit a 17-year high.
“If they do it once, I think it’s easier for them to try to do it again,” said Carrie Swartout, who researches traumatic brain injuries at the University of Maryland Medical Center. Maryland is requiring unpaid time off for 67,000 of its 80,000 employees as it struggles with a budget crisis. The state says the furloughs will save an estimated million during the fiscal year.
State governments, facing lower revenues but stymied by the long process required to cut public sector jobs, are using furloughs as a quick way to trim payrolls. Private-sector businesses — from automakers to small businesses — are shutting down factories and offices as sales drop.
The temporary layoffs are “kind of employment purgatory, but it’s better than the alternative,” said Carl Van Horn, a professor of public policy at Rutgers University. They’re a typical response to decreasing demand in a recession, although this round is slightly worse than past bad recessions, Van Horn said.
Of 10.3 million unemployed workers in November, roughly 12 percent were unemployed because of temporary layoffs, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The last time this many workers fell into the category was February 1991, when 1.4 million workers were unemployed because of temporary layoffs. As a proportion of the total work force, workers on temporary layoff are roughly 1 percent, nearly the same now as 17 years ago.
The numbers, based on a Census Bureau survey of households, likely understate temporary layoffs….
Where everyone else sees economic gloom and doom, Reid Hoffman sees opportunity. As the freshly minted CEO of LinkedIn (and its founder), he is shepherding a moneymaking tech company in battered Silicon Valley. And he anticipates more growth next year.
That is no small achievement. The social-networking site, which lets business professionals create online profiles to seek jobs and network, is adding members faster than ever despite its own recent layoffs and a management shake-up.
“LinkedIn is the office, Facebook is the barbecue in the backyard, and MySpace is the bar,” says Hoffman, referring to the three major social-networking sites battling it out for millions of consumers and billions of dollars in online ads.
“Every individual is a small business or brand,” Hoffman says. This month, he succeeded Dan Nye as CEO, whose two-year stint as chief executive was underscored by dramatic gains in members and revenue.
About 1 million people flock to the network every two weeks now, compared with 1 million per month earlier this year. (The site has 33 million members from 8 million two years ago.)
Gaining Momentum
The surge accelerated in early September, when murmurs of recession began to take hold and business professionals intensified their networking efforts.
Since then, LinkedIn has experienced a 14 percent surge in recommendations its members make about each other, an 11 percent increase in number of connections made between LinkedIn users, a 10 percent jump in invitations sent, and a 9 percent bump in page views.
Many of the gains have come from employees and laid-off workers in financial industries such as investment banking.
“I use it as a recruiting tool and as a way to network as more people use LinkedIn,” says Tim Whitman, a 36-year-old public-relations specialist in Boston who has 335 connections. “The economy is a factor. But it is a great business-networking tool in…
Following a recent report that an algorithm for creating secure Web-site certificates could be vulnerable, VeriSign has announced it will no longer use the algorithm.
On Wednesday, the provider of Internet trust assurances said it was transitioning from MD5 to the SHA-1 algorithm for its new RapidSSL brand certificates. It also pledged to reissue any RapidSSL certificates created with MD5, using SHA-1.
Fake Certificates in Three Days
Earlier this week, several teams of researchers presented research at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin about MD5 problems. The researchers included independent ones from California, as well as teams from the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) and Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, and the Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne in Switzerland.
The researchers were able to generate two messages with one digital signature, using MD5. Digital certificates are supposed to have unique signatures. Four years ago, Chinese researchers first identified the vulnerability when they created a similar collision attack.
At that time, the amount of computing power was considered formidable to anyone attempting to create false digital certificates. Researchers had estimated it would take more than 30 years of computer processing to generate such a fake certificate.
But the paper presented in Berlin showed there are more efficient ways. Using more than 200 Sony PlayStation 3 video-game machines in a cluster, the latest research effort was able to generate two fake messages with the same digital signature in only three days.
Observers had differing opinions on the impact of the research. The head of computer security at British Telecom, for instance, told news media that most people don’t rely on digital certificates anyway.
Secure Phishing
But many others suggested the impact could be enormous. Although only some sites are using the older digital certificates, all browsers accept them. When visiting Web sites, a locked padlock in a browser…
A proposed British database intended to store details of every phone call, e-mail and Web site visit made in the U.K. could be managed by a private sector contractor under government plans, the Guardian newspaper reported Wednesday.
Such outsourcing would be accompanied by tougher legal safeguards to guarantee against leaks and accidental data losses, the newspaper said, citing a consultation paper.
However, involving the private sector in handling such sensitive data is bound to generate more trouble for the plan, particularly given a series of high-profile losses of computers, disks and hard drives storing such material in recent years. The steady stream of data blunders has kept the spotlight on the way the government handles — or mishandles — its citizens’ information.
Britain’s Home Office will consult the public and communications industry on the proposals starting next month, but declined to say on Wednesday whether an option for a private company to manage the database will be included in documents circulated for discussion.
The government previously dropped plans to include the proposal in the annual legislative program announced earlier this month, saying more debate was necessary.
Civil liberties groups have expressed concern about the database, which would create an unprecedented store of information on each individual’s private communications in hopes of tracking the movements of criminals or terrorists.
Ken Macdonald, who stepped down as Britain’s director of public prosecutions in October, said the plans to create a database are the stuff of a “paranoid fantasy.”
“No other country is considering such a drastic step,” Macdonald was quoted by the Guardian as saying.
Such a database would provide “a complete readout of every citizen’s life in the most intimate and demeaning detail.”
“The notion of total security is a paranoid fantasy which would destroy everything that makes living worthwhile,” he was quoted as saying. “We must avoid surrendering our freedom.”
Intelligence…
The U.S. semiconductor industry, notoriously volatile even without the shock of a global economic downturn, was badly hurt in 2008 as prices for memory chips continued their dizzyingly rapid fall and demand for PC microprocessors dropped off amid weaker demand.
As such, shares of chip makers and companies serving the sector suffered during the year. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Sector index, which is comprised of chip companies as well as manufacturers of chip-making equipment, fell by nearly half in 2008. The index closed Tuesday’s trading session at 211.26, compared with 408.04 at the end of 2007.
“Things have been horrible all year and will continue to be horrible for the time being,” said Avi Cohen, managing partner with Avian Securities.
Even Intel Corp., which has performed relatively well this year, was punished in the stock market. The world’s biggest microprocessor maker recorded .1 billion in net income in the first nine months of 2008, up 7.5 percent from the previous year as it benefited from an improved manufacturing process and market-share gains.
But the tech bellwether’s shares lost about 45 percent of their value in 2008. A steep decline began in September as the financial sector crisis intensified. Additionally, a billion reduction to Intel’s fourth-quarter revenue forecast in November did little to inspire investor confidence.
Shares of Intel’s main rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. fared even worse, despite a turnaround plan that includes spinning off its factories into a joint venture and shedding 2,100 jobs. Furthermore, in July the company’s embattled chief executive Hector Ruiz stepped aside and was replaced by President and Chief Operating Officer Dirk Meyer.
AMD’s stock is trading at a multi-decade low of around per share, down about 70 percent for the year.
Job cuts were spread throughout the sector. KLA-Tencor Corp. and Applied Materials Inc., two of the world’s biggest makers…
Cisco Systems, the dominant provider of the digital pipes that run the Internet, is making a big play in digital entertainment. The company says it plans to introduce a new line of products in January, including a digital stereo system that is meant to move music wirelessly around a house.
That is the first small move in a long-term strategy to take on Apple, Sony and the other giants of consumer electronics. Cisco is working on other gadgets that will let people watch Internet video on their televisions more easily. And its biggest bet is that people will want to use a version of its corporate videoconferencing system, called Telepresence, to chat with their friends over their high-definition televisions.
The company has been talking about reaching out to consumers for years. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas two years ago, John Chambers, the Cisco chief executive, laid out a strategy for building networks for entertainment in the home. At the show last year, Cisco promised new technology that would help media companies publish more video that could be watched on these home networks.
But after delays, changes in plans and the assignment of a new executive to oversee all this, Cisco now says the first of its products will hit the shelves, and the video sites will be on the Web, next month.
While Cisco is a newcomer to the consumer electronics business, the company says that after years of promises by the industry, consumer electronics is only now taking advantage of broadband Internet connections and home networks.
“This holiday the vast majority of consumer electronics purchases will be connected,” said Ned Hooper, a Cisco senior vice president, during an interview before Christmas. Hooper was put in charge of the consumer electronics push a year ago. Many music players, digital cameras, game…
Over the weekend, I picked up a new wireless router to be the Internet hub of my house.
I was frustrated to find that many companies still offer routers that do not by default create password protection for the network.
You just plug the cable or DSL modem into the router, and you — and anyone else — can start surfing the Web.
In a rural area, it might not matter. In urban areas, an unprotected wireless network is an invitation for unwelcome visitors on your network.
Users will have unlimited access to your high-speed connection and any computer or device that is shared across the network.
Most routers have two major forms of security encryption that use a password: WEP and WPA.
WEP (wireless equivalency protocol) is the classic protection scheme that almost all routers support. It generates a shared key that a user must enter in order to connect to the wireless network.
WEP encryption generates four shared key values, one of which must be entered to access the network.
While this can provide some security, WEP has been cracked to the point that is almost obsolete. Anyone with a basic set of skills and tools can crack a WEP connection in 60 seconds or less. If you need bare-bones security, it’ll work in a pinch, but I’d recommend using WPA encryption, if possible.
WPA (Wi-Fi protected access) comes in two forms: WPA and WPA2. WPA was created to address many of the weaknesses in WEP and is superior in every way.
The major security issue with WEP is that the shared keys never change, which would allow anyone with some time on his hands to break into the network by pounding it with every possible password combination it can generate.
WPA, on the other hand, will establish a fresh set of keys after a period of time, which…
Nine creditors of South Korea’s Hynix Semiconductor said Tuesday they have agreed on a plan to pump 800 billion won (9 million) of fresh capital into the money-losing company.
The assistance will consist of 500 billion won (4 million) in new loans from early January, according to a statement from Korea Exchange Bank, one of the creditors.
KEB, said the rest will come in the form of a new share issuance by Hynix. Creditors will also roll over Hynix’s maturing debt by the end of next year.
Hynix, the world’s second-largest manufacturer of computer memory chips after Samsung Electronics Co., has racked up four straight quarters of net losses amid a long slump in the semiconductor industry.
The Icheon, South Korea-based company had been talking with the creditors, which own 36 percent of its shares, and was seeking up to 1 trillion won (8 million) in fresh capital.
Kim Eun-young, a KEB spokeswoman, said that the 500 billion won loan will be made by five banks among the nine creditors.
If Hynix cannot raise the remaining 300 billion won through a stock offering, the group of creditors will step in to purchase shares up to that amount, she said.
Park Seong-ae, a Hynix spokeswoman, said the company had no immediate comment.
Hynix announced earlier this month that it will carry out a massive cost-cutting effort to free up cash that can be used to help it recover from what it termed a “management crisis in line with the long downturn in the memory chip market and global economic slowdown.”
The company said it will slash top officials’ pay, cut the number of executives, encourage workers to quit voluntarily and make all employees take two weeks of unpaid leave between January and April next year.
Hynix competes with Samsung Electronics in NAND flash and DRAM, or dynamic random access memory, chips….
A proposal to create hundreds of new Internet domain names as alternatives to “.com” has suffered a setback as a key U.S. government agency warned that the plan might not benefit consumers or promote competition.
The Internet’s key oversight body, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, had planned to start accepting bids for new Internet suffixes early next year in what would be the first major overhaul of a decades-old addressing system.
But in a letter sent to ICANN last week, a top Commerce Department official, Meredith Baker, said it wasn’t clear “whether the potential consumer benefits outweigh the potential costs.” Baker heads the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration.
The NTIA letter argues that before introducing new domain names, ICANN needs to ensure that the plan would not jeopardize the stability and security of the Internet addressing system. And it says ICANN needs to examine whether companies operating the new domain name registries would have too much market power, including the power to raise domain name prices, and whether there should be more competition in the renewal of domain names.
Michael Palage, an adjunct fellow with the free-market think tank Progress & Freedom Foundation, said consumer protection is a top concern of trademark holders, including many big corporations, which often buy up multiple Internet addresses containing their company names to safeguard their brands, avoid consumer confusion and head off cybersquatters, phishing attacks and fraud.
Addressing concerns that ICANN could censor some controversial domain names, the NTIA letter also directs the organization to focus on technical functions related to the managing the Internet addressing system and “not on matters more appropriately addressed by governments, such as adjudication of morality, public order and community objections.”
In June, ICANN approved new guidelines to make it easier for organizations and groups to propose and…
Computer hackers could meet tough penalties under a draft amendment of the criminal law being debated by China’s top legislature.
The draft amendment under review by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC) would impose steep fines and prison sentences of three-to-seven years, depending on the severity of the offense.
The existing criminal law only imposes penalties on hackers who break into government, military and scientific research institutes’ computer systems.
“The articles in the draft amendment filled in the blank of the existing law by expanding the definition of the offended,” said Prof. Yu Gang, with the College of Criminal Justice under China University of Political Science and Law.
Under the current criminal law, most hackers would not be charged for breaking into a bank or business’s computer system, he said.
He Changchun, 71, who runs a digital photo printing service in northeastern Liaoning Province, was hacked by a rival two years ago. Thousands of photos his clients sent to him disappeared.
His rival, who goes by the name Shang, stole the password to online chatting software used by He and his employees to contact clients and receive their photos. These photos were kept in a rented FTP server.
Shang was able to use the password to destroy photos on the server.
In December this year, a court convicted Shang for “malfeasance competition” instead of hacking.
This kind of sabotage becomes more common as China’s Internet users continue to grow in number. China recorded the world’s most users at 290 million in November.
The notorious computer virus “Xiongmao Shaoxiang”, or “Panda burning joss stick,” infected millions of computers from November 2006 to March 2007.
The virus, with a signature flash image of a panda holding three joss sticks, not only crippled computers, but also stole the account names and passwords of online game players and popular chat sites.
People generally…
A trio of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students who found a way to hack into the Boston subway system’s payment cards have agreed to partner with transit officials there to make the system more secure.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced the agreement Monday, two months after the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority dropped a lawsuit against the students, who were represented for free by the EFF, a civil-liberties group that frequently takes up cases involving security researchers and computer hackers.
The transit agency had sued to stop the students from presenting findings at a computer-security conference.
The students — Zack Anderson, R.J. Ryan and Alessandro Chiesa — have argued all along they were trying to help the MBTA by giving it advance notice of their planned talk last summer and keeping specific details of their hack secret.
But the MBTA worried of widespread fare fraud if students discussed how they were able to add hundreds of dollars in value to MBTA’s two primary payment cards — CharlieCard and CharlieTicket.
Before they could take the stage at the DefCon hacker conference in Las Vegas in August, the students were slapped with a lawsuit and a restraining order preventing them from giving the talk. Everyone found out what they were going to say anyway: All 87 slides of the students’ presentation were already online, having been given out to conference attendees on CDs before the lawsuit was filed.
The MBTA argued it needed time to fix the problems, but the issue touched off a legal battle about whether the students’ free-speech rights were violated and prompted the EFF to take up the students’ case.
The judge eventually lifted the gag order and the transit agency dropped its lawsuit in October. The two sides have been working since then on how they would collaborate to make the fare system more secure…
When the T-Mobile G1 phone debuted in October, the mobile world was buzzing. But analysts were quick to cut through the hype with some insights on what the G1, the first Android-based mobile device, was lacking.
Now, just two months after the launch, the rumor mill is churning around a T-Mobile G2 that may remedy some of the first version’s shortcomings. T-Mobile was not immediately available for comment on the timing of a G1 successor.
“There’s certainly going to be a G2, G3, G4 … we’ll see continued iterations beyond the G1,” said Michael Gartenberg, vice president of mobile strategy at Jupitermedia. “The first iteration of the hardware itself wasn’t nearly as stunning as some of the other devices on the market. It was a little clunky, a little brick-like.”
The G1’s Cool Features
The G1 phone touts touchscreen functionality, a QWERTY keyboard, and a Google-centric mobile-Web experience. The G1 builds on the promise of the Google mobile operating system, which gives users access to the Android Market. There, customers can find and download applications to expand and personalize the HTC-made handset.
The G1 is loaded with Google Search, Google Maps, Google Street View, Gmail, YouTube and other popular Google software that PC users are familiar with. The phone launched with price tags starting at 9 for some existing customers, with a two-year voice and data agreement.
With one-click contextual search, users can search with the touch of a finger. A full HTML Web browser lets users see any Web page the way it was designed to be seen, and then zoom in to expand any section by tapping on the screen. Users who don’t want to launch applications and calls with the touchscreen can use a trackball device for one-handed navigation.
What the G1 Is Missing
If you aren’t a Google customer — or if you don’t…
Microsoft is investigating new public reports of a vulnerability that could allow remote-code execution on systems with supported editions of its Microsoft SQL Server products.
Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine, and Windows Internal Database are affected. Systems with Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 Service Pack 4, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3, and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 are not affected by this issue.
“Microsoft is aware that exploit code has been published on the Internet for the vulnerability addressed by this advisory,” Microsoft said in its security advisory. “Currently, Microsoft is not aware of active attacks that use this exploit code or of customer impact at this time.”
Alerting All Database Admins
According to Wolfgang Kandek, CTO of Qualys, the vulnerability in Microsoft’s SQL Server product is highly critical. Database administrators, he said, should immediately review and implement the workarounds Microsoft offered as soon as possible.
“MS SQL Server is a highly popular product as we have seen in April of this year, when [an] SQL-Injection vulnerability that specifically targeted MS SQL Server-driven Web sites was used to redirect users to Web sites serving malware,” Kandek said. “The effects of this attack are still out on the Internet, as we can still see sites that have fallen victim to the attack and that have not been restored to an exploit-free state.”
Kandek said the potential exists for private data leakage, as well as major disruptions in critical Microsoft SQL-driven applications, such as e-commerce and HR. On the positive side, Qualys believes companies have aggressively firewalled off their Microsoft SQL Server from being accessible directly on the Internet after the traumatic Slammer worm in 2003. That, Kandek said, should provide some protection from direct attacks….
Though 2008 is not yet over, Microsoft is already touting the achievements of its Xbox Live Arcade in the year to date — and dropping hints about what lies in store for its live gaming service between now and early 2009.
“Momentum for Xbox Live Arcade has been incredible this year,” said Scott Austin, the director of digitally distributed games for Microsoft. “Xbox Live Arcade has really become the top destination for premium downloadable games, and we’ve got a long list of games coming out in 2009 that we think will be just as incredible as what we already have on the service.”
Crowd Pleasers
The Xbox Live team launched more than 60 new game titles in 2008. The game Braid, which Time magazine named the No. 2 video game of the year, has already become the No. 1 highest-rated game of all time on Xbox Live Arcade.
Developed by Number None and published by Microsoft Game Studios, Braid also racked up the highest “metacritic” score of any downloadable game this year with a 93 rating — on par with popular retail titles such as Gears of War 2 and Fallout 3, the software giant noted. Another Xbox Live favorite called Castle Crashers was ranked as the No. 3 Xbox 360 video game of 2008 by Wired Game|Life.
Overall, about 110 million trial games have been downloaded on Xbox Live Arcade to date, according to Microsoft’s Xbox Live team. The platform reportedly had its best summer season to date, led by the release of Bionic Commando: Rearmed and Galaga Legions, which drove a 58 percent increase in unique members purchasing titles.
Revenue in August alone broke the service’s monthly revenue high at the time by 67 percent, the Xbox Live team noted. Additionally, more Xbox Live Arcade titles are slated to arrive between now…
There’s nothing like the thrill of last-minute holiday shopping. Some consider it frustrating, but I prefer to think of it as a challenge. If the person stuck on your list has a computer, you’re in luck. This week we’ll toss up a bevy of last-minute gift ideas guaranteed to please.
It definitely helps to know a little about the person in question — in this case, his or her computer wants and needs. You can spend a little or a lot to get something useful or just fun.
Computer maintenance isn’t festive, but it is essential. Every PC can use a can of compressed air, keyboard and monitor cleaner. Other supplies include printer paper, ink or toner, and blank CDs or DVDs. When buying blank discs, be certain whether the recipient has a CD or DVD burner. The former works only with CDs, and the latter works with CDs and DVDs. Get the R variety for widest compatibility, and avoid generic brands.
New mouse pads make thoughtful gifts. They come plain or printed, hard and soft, rubber or gel, in almost any design. Get one with a built-in wrist rest for long-term use. Everyone makes mouse pads these days, but for style and comfort, you can’t go wrong with pads from Belkin or Fellowes.
How about a mouse to go with that new pad? If the recipient’s current mouse is a hunk of junk, you can get by with a replacement of equal or better quality. But if the mouse works, you should shop for an upgrade in function and comfort. Remember, mice are personal, so what looks and feels right to you might not work well for someone else. Avoid generic mice, but you can’t go wrong with Microsoft or Logitech. Get an optical mouse with programmable buttons.
Other safe bets include desktop speakers,…
Over the past quarter, PC makers shipped more notebook PCs than desktops for the first time ever, marking a major milestone in the industry, according to market research firm iSuppli. While the number of units shipped worldwide during the third quarter looks relatively close — 38.6 million notebook PCs vs. 38.5 million desktop PCS — sales of notebook PCs experienced far more growth.
Figures released by iSuppli indicate notebook PC shipments rose almost 40 percent in the third quarter of 2008 compared to the same period of 2007. In contrast, desktop PC shipments dropped by 1.3 percent for the same period.
Not Too Surprising
Matthew Wilkins, who is principal analyst for computing platforms at iSuppli explains that, “Momentum has been building in the notebook market for some time, so it’s not a complete surprise that [notebook] shipments have surpassed those of desktops.”
At the same time, he points to the third-quarter news as a significant event in the PC market because it marks what he calls, “the start of the age of the notebook.”
The notebook PC, he says, is no longer a tool only for the business market, or for well-off consumers; “it’s now a computer for everyman.”
HP and Dell Stay Strong, Acer Moves Ahead
Further data from the iSuppli report show no major changes among the relative rankings of the Top-5 PC makers during Q3, although Acer experienced significant growth.
U.S.-based Hewlett-Packard retained the top spot, with shipments of 14.9 million units, and an 18.8 percent market share. Fellow U.S. PC-maker Dell maintained second place, shipping just under 11 million units, netting a market share of 13.9 percent.
Taiwan-based Acer remained in third place with a market share of 12.2 percent resulting from shipments of 9.7 million during the quarter. The iSuppli report called out Acer, in particular, for its “standout performance” during the…
