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Don't cry for me, Steve Ballmer

Publié: mars 29, 2012, 10:46pm CEST par Joe Wilcox

But I'll shed a tear for you and remember the good times we had together.

That's because IDC asserts, despite exciting Windows 8's coming launch, that the PC era will be over by 2016. Gartner uses a different metric to arrive at 2014. But whatever the measure, the Windows era is over, too, as (gulp) Android becomes the most widely shipped operating system on the planet. I guess you were right to obsess about Google after all. Cripes! As long ago as 2003, wasn't it? Who could have imagined that it would really come to this? You weren't being paranoid at all.

There has been talk for some time now about the post-PC era, which I call the cloud-connected device era. The rascals at IDC have similar thinking, creating the "smart connected devices" segment, which includes PCs, media tablets and smartphones. IDC predicts that x86 Windows PC share will drop from 35.9 percent last year to 25.1 percent in 2016. That's behind Android, which share goes from 29.4 percent to 31.1 percent -- not much of a gain if you really think about it. But the point, of course, is Android's ascension over Windows.

You know, perhaps hope isn't lost, Steve. Maybe we can have our Windows somewhere else, because I don't see that IDC has reckoned Windows on ARM. The analysts refer to Windows on x86 and Android on ARM. But, hey, aren't you prepping a slanky Windows 8 version for ARM, too? I hear rumors about Windows Phone 8 sharing same kernel. Now that would be something to get excited about.

"We are in the multi-device age, and we believe the number of people who use multiple devices will only continue to increase", Bob O`Donnell, IDC vice president, says. "The trick, moving forward, will be to integrate all these devices into a unified whole through use of personal cloud-type applications and services. That's the real challenge of what we have often called the 'PC Plus' era".

I'm Ready to Fly

Now, Steve, I heard you talk during Consumer Electronics Show about bringing a unified user experience across devices. That's Metro and what it inherits from the Windows Phone UI. I'm really excited about the cloud stuff behind it. My Windows Live SkyDrive is primed and ready for seamless sync and storage.

You best hurry and connect together the cloud and Windows-powered devices (Xbox, too!). Gartner's rash prediction puts the cloud as "center of users' digital lives" by 2014, replacing the PC. Rather than be the hub, the personal computer will be among the devices connected to the new one.

"Emerging cloud services will become the glue that connects the web of devices that users choose to access during the different aspects of their daily life", Steve Kleynhans, Gartner research vice president, says.

I believe him, Steve, and surely you do, too. Why else are you investing so much in the cloud, and why is its role so paramount to Windows 8 and Phone 7.5?

Google Gripes

I got to tell you that Google cloud sync pulls users into that "evil", competing ecosystem. comScore points out how much in February report "2012 Mobile Future in Focus". Looking at the US smartphone market:

Google-owned apps led across both iPhones and Android devices in terms of total unique active users. For iPhone users, YouTube ranked as the top app by unique visitors, followed by Google Maps, Facebook, Yahoo! Weather and Pandora Radio. Analysis of the Android market found that Google Search led as the top app, followed by Gmail, Google Maps, Facebook and Google News & Weather.

Google product and services integration is especially tight on Android 4.0, as I've seen from using Galaxy Nexus. Say, why is it I don't have a Windows Phone to use? Must I play Smoked by Windows Phone and win to get one?

Of course, Google just gives it all away for free, and that's good news for you. Android's share may rise above Windows, but not its appeal to developers.

"Android's growth is tied directly to the propagation of lower-priced devices," Tom Mainelli, IDC research director, says. "So, while we expect dozens of hardware vendors to own some share in the Android market, many will find profitability difficult to sustain". Same goes for developers he adds, then Mainelli ruins it all by emphasizing "we expect a large percentage of application developers to continue to focus their efforts on iOS". Oh yeah? What about Windows?

Steve, you really need to set these analysts straight. They act as if Windows is dead and buried already. I haven't given up on Windows yet -- version 8 is great -- but it's hard to keep the faith some days.
iPhone is unstoppable

Publié: mars 29, 2012, 8:36pm CEST par Joe Wilcox
Now there's a headline I never expected to write, particularly following "Android is unstoppable" nine months ago. But in the United States, at least, iPhone has nearly matched pace with Androids. Looks like the Apple apologists will get their day. After years of wrongly boasting iPhone's leadership over Androids, they might yet be right.

For the three months ending in February, 48 percent of Americans who recently bought a smartphone, chose Android -- 43 percent iPhone, according to Nielsen. Those numbers are up considerably for both, but iPhone surged to close the gap, following the release of the 4S in October. A year ago, 27 percent of new acquirers chose Android versus 10 percent for iPhone.

The Gain Drain

Android's overall market share is still considerably greater than iPhone's -- 48 percent to 32 percent, respectively. That's up from 38 percent for Android, 27 percent for iPhone nine months ago, by Nielsen's reckoning.

comScore reports similar share, but for end of January -- 48.6 percent for Androids and 29.5 percent iPhone, based on smartphone operating systems among US cellular subscribers.

Neilsen's findings join others. In February, Pew Internet asked American adults what kind of smartphone they own. Twenty percent responded "Android device", up from 15 percent in May 2011. iPhone: 19 percent, up from 10 percent during the same time period.

Pew puts the number of American adults with smartphones at 53 percent. Nielsen says 49.7 percent -- that's up from 36 percent in February 2011. Either way, smartphone sales soar, as the market rapidly consolidates around Androids and iPhone.

The China Syndrome

With the 4S launch, iPhone benefits from broader US distribution -- three of the four major carriers and regional ones, too. Additionally, Apple and its partners lowered the price to zero for the older iPhone 3GS and $99 for the 4, opening up the market to consumers who could't or wouldn't spend $199 or more.

iPhone's gains here may not be sustainable abroad. "Smartphone growth will be driven by Asia/Pacific countries, especially China, where mobile operators are subsidizing the purchase of 3G smartphones, thus increasing the total addressable market", Will Stofega, IDC program director, says. The analyst firm expect low-cost Androids to be market leaders. "In countries where devices are not subsidized by the mobile operators, competitive and component-based pricing will help drive volume".

CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly called China Apple's second most-important market, next to the United States. Perhaps this importance has something to do with his visit there this week.

Bold Predictions

IDC isn't exactly bullish about iPhone's future, particularly as smartphone adoption increases internationally, predicting that Windows Phone would beat out Apple's iOS by 2015. Two weeks ago, IDC made similar prediction about tablets: Android shipments will exceed iPad, also by 2015. By that reckoning, the firm predicts that Google's mobile OS will dominate the two major cloud-connected -- post-PC, if you insist -- device categories.

But I predict that Apple will win the mobile platform wars. Perhaps IDC tacitly agrees.

"Android's growth is tied directly to the propagation of lower-priced devices," Tom Mainelli, IDC research director, says. "So, while we expect dozens of hardware vendors to own some share in the Android market, many will find profitability difficult to sustain".

Show Me the Money

In platforms, profitability is everything. Typically, successful platforms share six common traits:
- There are good development tools and APIs for easily creating applications
- There is at least one killer application people really want
- There is breadth of useful applications
- Third parties make lots of money
- The platform is broadly available
- There is a robust ecosystem
But profitability matters most. Developers go where the money is.

IDC now lumps together PCs, smartphones and media tablets into the "smart connected devices segment". Among them, the firm sees Androids reaching 31.1 percent share in 2016, compared to 17.3 percent for iOS devices.

However, "we expect a large percentage of application developers to continue to focus their efforts on iOS, despite the platform's smaller overall market share, because iOS end users have proven more willing to pay for high-quality apps", Mainelli says.

Developers go where the money is. End users go where the apps are. Developers create apps where users are. iPhone 4S isn't an exceptional upgrade compared to its predecessor. There's no LTE, for example. Siri is interesting, for sure. But they're not compelling enough to explain iPhone's recent sales surge.

It is the broader ecosystem -- of apps, cases and peripherals -- that matters more. In the 1990s, Microsoft sought to achieve a "standard" platform for developers and succeeded with Windows. Apple is quickly doing the same around iOS, iPhone and iPad.

iPhone is unstoppable because the broader iOS ecosystem has such momentum -- and there iPad hugely matters. I don't believe iPhone can win the smartphone wars. But does it matter if iOS apps and devices win the platform wars?
Red Hat: Open source's first billion dollar company

Publié: mars 29, 2012, 7:27pm CEST par Ed Oswald

Shares of Red Hat rose 17 percent to $60.12 in heavy midday trading. Yesterday, after the bell, the company reported $1.13 billion revenues for fiscal 2012, ended February 29. Red Hat is the first open-source based company to post $1 billion in revenues

Quite a feat for a platform Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer once called a "cancer" and has repeatedly questioned the security of. One has to wonder if Ballmer might be reconsidering the parnership Microsoft penned with Red Hat back in February 2009.

Much of the company's revenue comes from its subscription products: $952 million in fact. Red Hat says it sees a high rate of renewals, and its top five customers have over $1 million in subscriptions, with one exceeding $5 million dollars.

Red Hat successfully fended off challenges from Oracle, which had taken the strategy of offering support for Linux at half the price. While Oracle has done a good business with its offering, by and large IT decision makers appear to have stuck with Red Hat even at a higher cost.

"This achievement will finally put to bed the argument that 'nobody can make money with open source'," Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin writes in a blog post. "Credit where credit is due: Red Hat has worked extremely hard and extremely smart to leverage open source to make a billion dollars".

Zemlin notes that the collective investment in Linux surpasses $10 billion dollars, and top tech companies like Facebook have leveraged the platform to build businesses worth tens of billions of dollars. Is Linux coming of age? You could argue that it is.

Red Hat has certainly spurred much of this development. Since its software is offered under the General Public License (GPL), competitors have been free to pillage its work. That taken into consideration, Red Hat's $1 billion in revenue is all the more astounding.

"The open source technologies which we provide are being selected by more customers every day as they re-architect the infrastructure of their data centers for greater efficiency, agility and cloud enablement", CEO Jim Whitehurst boasts of the company's achievement.
Google's Go programming language hits the 1.0 milestone

Publié: mars 29, 2012, 6:35pm CEST par Tim Conneally

Over two years in the making, Google's Go project on Wednesday hit its 1.0 version milestone release, this is the first time the general-purpose programming environment has been made available in supported binaries on Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS, and Windows.

This release defines both the specification of the Go language and the specification of a set of its core APIs, and implements them in the form of two compiler suites, and the core libraries themselves.

"Go 1 introduces changes to the language (such as new types for Unicode characters and errors) and the standard library (such as the new time package and renamings in the strconv package)," Google Engineer and Go Team member Andrew Gerrand said on Wednesday. "Also, the package hierarchy has been rearranged to group related items together, such as moving the networking facilities, for instance the rpc package, into subdirectories of net."

The appropriately named go command is one of the central elements of the Go toolkit. go does not use Makefiles or other configuration files to guide program construction. Instead, it uses the source code to find dependencies and determine build conditions.

While 1.0 includes some changes from previous versions, one of the language's core tenets is source-level compatibility. So any program written in Go 1.0 will compile and run properly for as long as the specification exists.

"At some indefinite point, a Go 2 specification may arise, but until that time, Go programs that work today should continue to work even as future 'point' releases of Go 1 arise (Go 1.1, Go 1.2, etc.)," the Go 1.0 documentation says.

Download Go 1.0 in FileForum now! Relevant documents and developer support forums can be found at golang.org.
Recover data from most any storage device

Publié: mars 29, 2012, 5:46pm CEST par Nick Peers

Smart Projects has updated its shareware data recovery tool, ISOBuster, to version 3.0. Previously limited to examining and recovering data from optical discs such as DVD, CD and Blu-ray, ISOBuster 3.0 now extends support to a wide array of disk formats, including hard disks, memory cards, USB thumb drives and even Zip, Jaz and floppy disks, adding support for the NTFS filing system at the same time.

Past versions of ISOBuster were renowned for being able to recover data from corrupt and even physically damaged optical discs, and the functionality will be similar for newly supported drive and file system formats too.

ISOBuster 3.0 allows users to view optical discs as sessions and tracks. On the newly supported drive formats, sessions are replaced by partitions, allowing users to view Windows, DOS, Macintosh and HFS partitions immediately along with all supported file systems (NTFS, UDF, FAT/FAT32 and HFS/HFS+).

Users then navigate the drives in the same way they would optical discs in ISOBuster, allowing them to perform data recovery in exactly the same way, with the ability to view forensic information as an overview or sector-by-sector if required. Portions of the media being examined can be extracted for further investigation or as part of the data recovery process, regardless of file system and what Windows itself sees.

You can also access data from older disc burning sessions as well as hidden partitions using an Explorer-like interface. The tool can also be used to open and extract data from a variety of virtual disk formats, including ISO, BIN, DMG, UDF and VDMK formats, without having to open the file in its parent application.

Most of this new functionality is restricted to paid-for versions of the software only -- the old single Pro license has been replaced by a two-tiered Personal ($39.95) and Professional & Business ($59.95) license, reflecting the expansion in features in the new version. Smart Projects provides a comparison table highlighting the differences in functionality between Free, Personal and Professional & Business editions.

ISOBuster 3.0 is a free feature-limited download for PCs running Windows 2000 up to, and, including, Windows 8. Registered users of ISOBuster 2.x get a 30 per cent discount for an unspecified “limited period of time” – a dedicated upgrade page provides full instructions.

Photo Credit: Serg64/Shutterstock
Protect your deleted data with Disk Wipe

Publié: mars 29, 2012, 5:36pm CEST par Mark Wilson

Whether you’re concerned that files you have stored on a USB drive might be recovered by someone else after they have been deleted, or you are selling your computer and want to ensure that none of your personal documents can be accessed, almost everyone has a need to securely delete data at some point. Simply deleting files is not enough as there are all manner of tool in existence that can be used to restore them, but Disk Wipe is a free, easy to use app that helps to ensure that when a drive is formatted, none of its data is recoverable.

It is not just hard drives that the app can be used to secure. If you have stored private documents on a USB drive or have photos or other files stored on a memory card, the same app can be used to completely format any FAT, FAT32 or NTFS drive that can be accessed from within Windows. In addition to the secure file wiping, Disk Wipe also provides you with a good deal of information about the drives it detects, such as the number of sectors, the manufacturer and serial number.

The entire wiping process is wizard-based and you’ll be guided through each step of selecting a new file system and choosing which wiping method should be used. The method of wiping that you choose can have a huge bearing on how long the process takes, so if you are wiping a removable drive you may want to decide between whether you want to continue using your computer for other tasks, and you can choose to run wiping processes at different priority levels accordingly.

Being a portable app means that Disk Wipe does not need to be installed and can be added to your USB drive for transporting from machine to machine. This may not be a tool you use on a regular basis, but its ease of use it something you will welcome when the time comes. More advanced users will appreciate the inclusion of a hex view that can be used to view information about a drive and you can jump straight to particular clusters with the simple search tool.

You can find out more and download a free copy of this great security tool by paying a visit to the Disk Wipe review page.

Photo Credit: Anneka/Shutterstock
Face.com: You can't stay 29 forever

Publié: mars 29, 2012, 5:24pm CEST par Joe Wilcox

Are you 35 and claiming to be 29? Don't post photos to Facebook. Today Face.com added a new attribute to its facial-detection API: age detection. The startup claims the new attribute will let developers create apps that use three criteria -- minimum, maximum and estimated age -- to determine how old people are in photos.

While the technology surely will appeal to social networkers, the big boon could be marketers looking to maximize exposure to select demographic groups, such as 18-24 year olds. Developers can set the attribute to look for specific age segments, hence the marketing potential. But there are others, such as detecting fake IDs at establishments serving alcoholic beverages. Additionally, Face.com claims to have improved facial recognition by 30 percent in this release of the API.

Face.com launched in March 2009 and claims that 40,000 developers use its API, which still is in beta (Is nothing ever finished anymore?). There is a developer website, for anyone interested in using the API.

The company also offers several apps, including KLIK for iOS. Yes, the tech is available on Facebook.
Opera Mini 7 launches for Android

Publié: mars 29, 2012, 5:14pm CEST par Tim Conneally

Opera Software on Wednesday released the latest version of its compact Opera Mini browser for Android devices, which was heretofore available only as an Opera Next advance build.

Opera Mini 7 for Android features improved hardware acceleration for faster and smoother performance, and features the ability to set up the homescreen with an unlimited number of Speed Dial buttons.

As has always been the case with Opera Mini, the biggest selling point, besides its ability to sync with your desktop Opera browser, is its server-side compression, which reduces the amount of data you consume while browsing on a mobile data connection.

Download Opera Mini 7 in Google Play now!

Amazon has not yet updated its listing of Opera Mini to version 7, so Kindle Fire users have to obtain Opera Mini 7 directly from Opera.
Get AIDA64 Extreme Edition 1.85 for free, but hurry!

Publié: mars 29, 2012, 12:11am CEST par Mike Williams

Properly understanding what’s happening on your PC -- monitoring hardware, assessing performance, diagnosing errors -- normally requires you to navigate a host of Control Panel applets and third-party tools. But if you’re tired of such hassles, then there is an easier way: install AIDA64 Extreme Edition 1.85 and you’ll get a whole library of PC management and information tools in a single, easy-to-use package.

Need to know more about your PC devices, for instance? AIDA64 provides detailed reports on your motherboard, BIOS, RAM, hard drive, sound card, network adapters, PCI and USB-connected devices, their resource use and more, so you can get a feel for your system setup without having to open the case.

If you’re worried that hardware issues are responsible for some PC problems then a System Stability Text will exercise your CPU, memory and hard drives to see how they cope. AIDA64 can also monitor your system temperature, fan speed, voltages and more, quickly highlighting any issues you might have. And if you plan to push your PC beyond its usual limits then a handy Overclock report can help, detailing CPU stepping, clock, multiplier, FSB, memory timings, CPU clock and more.

You’re more concerned about software? AIDA64 also reports on your installed programs. It’ll list the software licences of some supported programs (including Windows and Microsoft Office), handy as an easy way to back them up. Tools such as the Event Log will help to diagnose problems, and there are useful reports on your startup programs, scheduled tasks, installed Sidebar gadgets and file associations, amongst others.

The list goes on, with individual settings reporting on your network setup, multimedia configuration (including installed codecs), and security (key patches, installed settings and more). A Benchmarks section makes it easy to assess your RAM and CPU performance. And powerful reporting options mean you can save any of these details for future reference, which will also help to highlight changes.

To obtain your free copy of AIDA64 Extreme Edition 1.85, worth $39.95, first visit the Downloadcrew Giveaway site on Thursday March 29, between 00:00 and 23:59 Central European Time. That's 7 pm EDT March 28 to 6:59 pm EDT March 29.

Log in, creating a free account if you don’t have one already, and download the installation file. And we’ll provide you with a coupon code which you can then redeem for a free licence key (check the Giveaway page on Thursday for the full instructions).

Photo Credit: studio online/Shutterstock