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Takeup will be 'significantly more rapid than seen with Windows 7' The first six months of 2016 will see an upsurge in pilot rollouts of Windows 10, Gartner has predicted. Many enterprises will then broaden their deployments later in the year with Gartner expecting at least half to have started some form of production deployment by the beginning of 2017, and looking to complete migrations in 2019. That will help Windows 10 become Microsoft's most widely deployed operating system, following in the footsteps of Windows 7 and Windows XP, Gartner said. That may, or may not, be what Microsoft wants...

Dell has published a guide on how to remove the web security backdoor it installed in its Windows laptops and desktop PCs. This confirms what we all know by now – that Dell was selling computers with a rather embarrassing hole it in their defenses. New models from the XPS, Precision and Inspiron families include a powerful root CA certificate called eDellRoot, which puts the machines' owners at risk of identity theft and banking fraud. The self-signed certificate is bundled with its private key, which is a boon for man-in-the-middle attackers: for example, if an affected Dell connects to a...

Analysis Dell ships Windows computers with software that lets websites slurp up the machine's exact specifications, warranty status, and other details without the user knowing. This information can be used to build a fingerprint that potentially identifies a person while she browses across the web. It can be abused by phishers and scammers, who can quote the information to trick victims into thinking they're talking to a legit Dell employee. And, well, it's just plain rude. A website created by a bloke called Slipstream - previously in these pages for exposing security holes in UK school IT software - shows...

"Don't Think Different. . . Think Same!" That mind-closing statement is just one from the upcoming biopic, "Michael Dell." When a confused and obviously new-on-the-job Dell "engineer" shows Michael Dell the latest plastic Windows PC box to emerge from the Dell "labs," and is told to just start shipping it without even turning it on, the confused sap asks, "Bu, but, we need to make it great?" In a nearly memorable emotional highlight, Dell responds with brutal clarity, "No! You need to make it cheap!" Later, in the film’s most revealing line, Dell discloses his company’s entire raison d'etre, the...

Is Linux Mint a terrible desktop distribution? How bad is Linux Mint as a desktop distribution? One redditor shared his...er...frustration with the...er...horrifically difficult experience of installing Linux Mint on his computer. Itripovermyownfeet shared his thoughts in the Linux Mint subreddit: This is awful, when I install Linux on the desktop I'm expecting to be able to waste a solid 8 hours chasing down random issues that were solved on all other modern desktop systems by 2008. I went into this hoping and wishing to have to crawl through linuxquestions.org threads from 2006 to figure out why plugging in a second...

Duo Security researchers found a second weak digital certificate on a new Dell Inspiron laptop The fallout from a serious security mistake made by Dell is widening, as security experts find more issues of concern. Researchers with Duo Security have found a second weak digital certificate in a new Dell laptop and evidence of another problematic one circulating. The issue started after it was discovered Dell shipped devices with a self-signed root digital certificate, eDellRoot, which is used to encrypt data traffic. But it installed the root certificate with the private encryption key included, a critical error that left many...

TICONDEROGA, N.Y. — Capt. James T. Kirk writhes in pain, having been tortured at the hands of his Klingon captors, as his shocked and saddened crew members speed away toward unknown parts of the universe, presuming Kirk is dead after his mysterious disappearance. From Our Advertisers The action might have once unfolded at Desilu Studios in Hollywood, where the original “Star Trek” series was filmed, but it happened in a former dollar store on the main street of this upstate town, best known for its 18th century stone fort where a part of the Revolutionary War was contested over 200...

AdBlock Plus users in Chrome and Firefox report seeing error messages instead of their inboxes. Yahoo may be hoping that access to your email is more important than freedom from advertisements.Some users of AdBlock Plus have reported that they can't access Yahoo Mail in Chrome or Firefox on the desktop. Instead of seeing their inboxes, the get the following error message: "Uh oh. . . We are unable to display Yahoo Mail. Please disable Ad Blocker to continue using Yahoo Mail." The reports, first spotted by Digiday, surfaced in the AdBlock Plus forums on Thursday. Andrei Herasimchuk, a former Yahoo...

Speaking at Samsung Electronics' 2015 Investors Forum, a series of company executives spent hours saying very little, while talking about "innovations" such as phase detection Focus Pixels and camera sensor Deep Trench Isolation that iPhones already have. Source: Samsung Samsung will "lead by following" Apple Watch Samsung LSI marketing team head Kyushu Hong spoke at length about "Innovation for the next mobile experience," outlining plans to introduce a "Bio Processor" chip that packed a series of components related to health related data recording. Source: Samsung Asked when the new chip would be introduced and when Samsung expected it to become...

Apple came out unscathed from a legal battle involving digital rights management IP owned by ContentGuard, a subsidiary of non-practicing entity Pendrell Corp. that sued the iPhone maker for infringing on five patents. The jury handed down its decision in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas on Friday, finding Apple not in infringement of five DRM-related patents owned by ContentGuard, reports Reuters. While not responsible for damages, Apple was not able to prove the patents-in-suit invalid. Apple was accused of illegally applying patented DRM technologies to its digital content distribution services, including music, movies and TV...

Microsoft's cash cow celebrates three decades of PC dominance On November 20, 1985, Microsoft unveiled its graphical operating system. Windows 1.0 offered a new way to navigate a PC, clicking a cursor on various boxes rather than scrolling through lines of text in order to navigate data and applications. While arguably less efficient than a command line, the graphical user interface (GUI) was more intuitive and easier for novice users to manage. Running Windows 1.0 required a PC running DOS 2.0 as well as two double-sided floppy disk drives, 256K of memory, and a new-fangled device known as a "graphics...

A report was just released from Canaccord Research and in combination with research from IDC, we get these utterly absurd results. * Apple accounted for only 13.5% of total smartphones shipped globally. * Apple takes home 94% of the total smartphone industry profit. Yes, while Apple sells 1 out of every 8 smartphones, it takes essentially all of the profit from the entire industry with just that market share. Huh? For the record, Microsoft (MSFT) accounts for -1% (negative, i.e a loss). Here's an easier way to look at those numbers. MORE CONTEXT There were over 1.2 billion smartphones sold...

Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, LLC (CIRP), today released research on the installed based of iPhones in the USA. CIRP finds that as of the end of the September 2015 quarter, 101 million iPhones were in use in the USA, including 58 million iPhone 6 and 6 Plus and 4 million iPhone 6s and 6s Plus models (Chart 1).“The analysis shows the continued strength of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, now one year old,” said Mike Levin, Partner and Co-Founder of CIRP, in the statement. “We estimate a combined 60 million of these flagship phones sold in the US from...

So, I'm still seeing smart quotes mess up. There was a thread a little while ago whereby I said what the problem was, but it's still extant. Here's the problem: All the web-tier stuff is using UTF-8 (which is a great idea), but *something*, probably the database tier, is using CP-1252. I suspect either: a) Database table for posts on SQL Server is set to collate and/or store the windows-1252/CP-1252 character set. or b) something between the web level and the DB level is doing character set interpretation in an incorrect way. There's 1252 in there somewhere, and that's what's...

If a real cat isn't an option for you, this could be a way around that. Toy company Hasbro is offering a new adult toy, Companion Pets, targeted specifically for seniors. The "Joy for All" pets are robotic cats that "look, feel and sound like real cats," Hasbro says. There are three different-colored cats to choose from on the website. All are priced at $99.99.

This year's Blender Conference was filled with all kinds of interesting talks about interesting uses of Blender and open source technology. A particularly novel one that caught my eye was nestled neatly within the art and pipeline presentation for the Blender Institute's open movie, Cosmos Laundromat. In that talk, Paul Benoît of Qarnot Computing spoke about his company's very unique render farm. It's common knowledge that high-performance computing (HPC) generates a lot of heat. At HPC datacenters, a lot of time and energy is spent figuring out how to cool these powerful computers. Not only does this have a significant...

Web scum foiled in Win 10 net ship. Microsoft has nixed the ability for its Edge browser to run unsigned dynamic link libraries (DLLs) in a move that will make life hard for dodgy extensions and ad injector merchants. Edge senior program manager Crispin Cowan says the update was dropped last week in the latest Windows 10 update and follows Redmond's plan to harden its web browsing asset. Last May Microsoft killed ActiveX and Browser Helper Objects making Edge faster and more stable, Cowan says. "Web browsers are an attractive target, because in-browser advertisements can be a significant source of...

Within walking distance of Tesla Motors' Palo Alto headquarters and across the street from Hewlett-Packard, Ford Motor Co. has set up a new Silicon Valley outpost. With a team of 100 reporting to a former Apple engineer, the Detroit giant is researching how humans experience machines, running autonomous-vehicle driving simulations and testing software that examines how bicycles and cars interact. "For 100 years, automobiles have been a mechanical engineering industry," said the center's director, Dragos Maciuca, who on his morning commute drives past a nearby research center of German automotive electronics and parts supplier Bosch. "Now, there is the shift...

...And 80% of Windows phone owners desert the ecosystem for Android or iOS. Windows phone shipments took a nose-dive in the third quarter, plummeting 35% from the same period in 2014, researcher Gartner said today. By comparison, total global smartphone shipments climbed 15% in the third quarter. Of the 353 million smartphones shipped in the September quarter worldwide, less than 6 million were powered by Microsoft's Windows, making Windows' share 1.7%, Gartner estimated, down from 3% in the same quarter of 2014. Windows phones shipments tumbled in some of the historic strongholds for the OS, said Roberta Cozza, a Gartner...

Help teach Cortana to say 'Sorry, Dave' Microsoft's decided that it, too, wants to open source some of its machine learning space, publishing its Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit (DMTK) on Github. Google released some of its code last week. Redmond's (co-incidental?) response is pretty basic: there's a framework, and two algorithms, but Microsoft Research promises it will get extended in the future. The DMTK Framework is front-and-centre, since that's where both extensions will happen. It's a two-piece critter, consisting of a parameter server and a client SDK. The parameter server has "separate data structures for high- and low-frequency parameters", Microsoft...