If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Nearly 80 percent of businesses have Macs in-house, nearly double the number that said they had users running Mac OS X two years ago, a research firm said Thursday. "Then we were talking about onesies and twosies," said Laura DiDio, a Yankee Group research fellow who conducted a survey of over 700 senior IT administrators and C-level executives. "Now the number of actual users is very significant. A number of the businesses said that they had 50 or 100 or even several thousand Macs deployed."
In early 2006, when DiDio last polled corporate IT professionals on Mac deployment, 47 percent said that they had Apple hardware in their environments. DiDio was impressed with the growth of Macs in business considering that Apple Inc. itself has put little to no official effort into that part of the market. "This isn’t a tidal wave, but it’s certainly a sustained trend," she said. "Apple has a beachhead in business. Where it once had just 1-2 percent market share in corporate, now they’re up to 8-10 percent," DiDio added.

View: The full story @ InfoWorld

Internet regulators voted to loosen restrictions on internet names, a move that could allow thousands of variations of suffixes beyond the basic .com or .ca. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) overwhelmingly approved the new guidelines on Thursday in Paris after weeklong meetings. The guidelines represent one of the biggest changes to the internet in its 25-year history.
New names won’t begin appearing for several months and ICANN won’t be deciding on specific ones. The organization must decide how much the new domain names will cost. The names are expected to cost over $100,000 apiece to help ICANN cover up to $20 million in costs. The new guidelines could allow for domain names that have been requested, and denied by ICANN, for years, such as .xxx for adult websites and .post for postal service websites. Companies with well-known names like eBay, Apple or Google could also end up requesting domain names if the new rules are approved, snatching up names like .ebay, .mac and .goog.

View: Full Story at CBC.ca

WindowsAndMe is a new website launched by Microsoft. It will be the place where the Windows community at large will come together to share their experiences, explore the magical world of Windows and learn to make the most of their digital experience.

Share your experiences, voice your opinion & learn from other Windows users to get more out of your PC experience. We have a panel of “Windows Gurus” who can help you with your questions or concerns. As a member of Windows and Me, you will be informed about the trendiest new features and innovations in the world of Windows. Also, we have some great partnerships in place to give you exclusive offers. We encourage you to visit the site regularly to enjoy these benefits.

Editorial Note: The authenticity of this site has not been verified and has been questioned by many of our members. Please use caution when entering any personal information into this website.

Sony is getting ready to directly link its consumer electronics products and considerable movie and TV content libraries. Later this year the company will begin providing video content to PlayStation 3 users via the recently-launched PlayStation Network, and will start a streaming video service for owners of Bravia TVs with a network connection.
"This continues to be one of the clearest opportunities for Sony to leverage its entertainment assets to differentiate its electronics products," said Howard Stringer, chairman and CEO of Sony at a Tokyo news conference. As part of the push the company will increasingly build Internet connectivity into its products. By March 2011, it plans to have network-enabled and wireless capable products available in 90 percent of its product categories, and aims to roll out the video services to key devices by the same date.

View: The full story @ PCWorld

The civil service’s systems will be subjected to new attacks by independent white hat hackers in a bid to spot weaknesses in government data handling before catastrophic losses occur, it was announced today.
The white hat programme is one of a suite of targets, training and scrutiny measures that Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell hopes will bring about a "culture change" across the civil service and restore public faith in the government’s competence in handling sensitive data. He said: "The risk we must counter is that citizens and business lose trust in the Government to handle their data effectively. It would be foolish not to acknowledge that the lapses in data security have affected this confidence."

View: The full story @ The Reg

Web content management firm SDL Tridion has released the results of its research into what elements of web site design most turn off internet users, coming in top is pop up advertising. Seventy-eight percents of respondents said that this type of advertising was the most frustrating web experience, complaining that ads appeared at inappropriate times and were difficult to get rid off. SDL said that this kind of annoyance was indicative of what it called "bimbo web design", saying that sites were often "attractive, but with no substance."
“First impressions count and no company wants bimbo characteristics on its website,” said Erik Aeyelts Averink, President SDL Tridion. “All ‘fluff’ and no content drives website users mad. Don’t push customers away and annoy them for no reason.”

View: The full story @ vnunet

There are now more than one billion PCs in use worldwide and this number will double by the year 2014, according to Gartner research. The figures relate to computers that are actually being used, as opposed to those that have merely been shipped over a period of time. Over half of these PCs (58 per cent) are based in established markets such as Western Europe, Japan and the US.
But these regions only account for 15 per cent of the world’s population. Users in emerging markets will play an increasingly large role in driving global take up, said George Shiffler, research director at Gartner. “We expect per-capita PC penetration in emerging markets to double by 2013,” said Shiffler.

View: The full story @ vnunet

Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit recently kicked off the biggest hiring spree in its 11 years of existence. Ironically, the group’s attempts to lure talent sound a lot like Apple’s own efforts to highlight its position as the Arthur Fonzarelli of the IT industry. In a recent post to the Office for Mac Team Blog, Craig Eisler, general manager of the Mac Business Unit, announced the hiring campaign and highlighted the unique place the group occupies within the Microsoft galaxy.
"We are the brightest, coolest, and most interesting business unit at Microsoft — if we do say so ourselves," Eisler said in the blog post. Although presented in tongue-in-cheek fashion, Eisler’s description is reminiscent of Apple’s tendency to contrast its own coolness with Microsoft’s plodding nerdiness. But to Apple partners, the coming expansion of Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit is a sign of the robust health and continued emergence of their preferred platform.

View: The full story @ CRN

Nokia on Tuesday announced it plans to acquire all of Symbian, which develops an operating system for mobile phones. The Finnish phone giant currently owns about 48 percent and will pay €264 million ($410 million) for the rest. It has received thumbs up from Sony Ericsson, Ericsson, Panasonic Mobile Communications, and Siemens, which represents about 91 percent of the Symbian shares subject to the offer, according to a statement from Nokia.
Samsung Electronics, a partial stakeholder in Symbian, hasn’t commented yet, but Nokia said it expects the company to agree to the sale. The deal doesn’t come as a surprise to Geoff Blaber, an analyst at CCS Insight. "Nokia paid out more than $250 million in Symbian license fees last year, so it makes commercial sense to buy Symbian for about $410 million, rather than keep paying what is effectively a subsidy to the other shareholders," Blaber wrote in a company blog.

View: The full story @ Infoworld

As Bill Gates prepares to end his full-time work at Microsoft, he tells the BBC in an interview that it wasn’t just what Microsoft did, but what his rivals didn’t do that let Microsoft get ahead. "Most of our competitors were very poorly run," he tells Fiona Bruce, for The Money Programme. "They did not understand how to bring in people with business experience and people with engineering experience and put them together. They did not understand how to go around the world."
Sir Alan Sugar, one of Britain’s computer pioneers with his Amstrad range, testifies to Microsoft’s global mobility even as a comparatively small company in the 1980s. Amstrad, in Brentwood, Essex, was visited by a Microsoft salesman - or "mid-Atlantic smoothie" as Sir Alan describes him - who came to sell Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system.

View: Full Article @ BBC News