Hasta La Gadget!

The Is have been dotted, the Ts have been crossed with a flourish, and pretty soon Nokia will have very little indeed to do with its formerly beloved Symbian OS. Oh sure, the company promises to keep it going with such standout devices as the Oro, but responsibility for developing and supporting Symbian is being wholly handed over to Accenture, along with 2,800 employees. When announced back in April, the deal called for 3,000 Nokia worker bees to make the jump over, so we suspect a few more (hopefully voluntary) redundancies are making up the difference with the new number. Now that everything’s been finalized, you can expect the switchover to take place in “the early part of October.” Accenture promises to care for its ailing patient through 2016, after which point even the most die-hard of fans will have to make the switch to a mobile OS from the 21st century. Full PR after the break.

Continue reading Nokia and Accenture seal Symbian handover deal

Nokia and Accenture seal Symbian handover deal originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Jun 2011 02:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on June 22, 2007 by CyberNet.

So here we sit, 5-months after the consumer launch of Vista and 7-months after the commercial/business launch. Seeing that security is an important aspect in many people’s lives, Jeff Jones decided to see how Vista stacked up more than 6-months after its release. Before I get into anything it is probably important to note that Jeff is the Security Strategy Director for Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group, which might affect how you look at these results.

The chart below shows the number of high severity vulnerabilities found in some common operating systems during the first 6-months of the release. Jeff decided to not include the vulnerabilities for third-party applications that are commonly included with Linux, such as OpenOffice and Gimp. Here are the results:

Here is a look at the first 6-months of the operating systems in the chart:

• Vista: 12 vulnerabilities fixed and 10 were high severity.
• XP: 36 vulnerabilities fixed and 23 were high severity.
• Red Hat Enterprise: 214 vulnerabilities fixed and 62 were high severity.
• Ubuntu 6.06: 74 vulnerabilities fixed and 28 were high severity.
• Novell SLED10: 123 vulnerabilities fixed and 44 were high severity.
• Mac OS X 10.4: 60 vulnerabilities fixed and 18 were high severity.

While that chart flatters Vista for having just one high severity vulnerability unpatched, it also doesn’t tell the whole truth. At the end of the 6-month period in XP there were only three unpatched vulnerabilities (over all severities), Ubuntu had 11 unpatched, and Vista sits with 15 unpatched. So in terms of fixing the high severity vulnerabilities Microsoft is really on top of it, but what about the other 15 vulnerabilities that are still out there?

Not only that, but 5 of the 12 vulnerabilities that they fixed were for Internet Explorer, so anyone not using that as their browser is already a lot safer! Time to go get Firefox or Opera…

Another interesting fact is that over the last month 91% of our visitors have been using Windows. Breaking it down even further shows that only 15% are using Vista and 73% are using XP, which leads to another obvious question. Not enough people have made the upgrade to Vista yet, so why would the hardcore hackers target that operating system? At this point it isn’t really worth their time.

Source: PC World

Props to CoryC for the tip

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Just days ago, Google snapped up SageTV to bolster its Google TV ecosystem. Now, the team in Mountain View appears to be on its way to making good on its promise to put the Android Market on the platform as well. Those with a Revue or other Google TV system can now see them listed as “other” in their list of My Devices in the Market. Of course, you can’t actually download any apps to your Google-fied box just yet, but it’s a start, right? Besides, if you’re really that anxious for Google to give you access to Market apps, you can just get your hands dirty and do it yourself.

Google TVs pop up in Android Market device listings, still can’t download apps originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 08:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on September 02, 2008 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

Windows; Mac
Finding a good alarm clock to help get you up in the wee hours of the morning can be tough. I have a tendency of placing the clock out of arms reach so that I have to get out of bed in order to turn it off. What I use as an alarm varies from things like my cellphone or TV all the way to my computer.

For some odd reason it seems as though free alarm clocks for computers are tough to come by these days. A few years ago we covered a decent alarm clock called Citrus that offered a lot of the functionality people would expect, and the best part was that it was free. Unfortunately the freeware stage didn’t last long, and it’s now a $13 program. Similarly Aurora for Mac used to be free, but it now bears a $22 price tag.

So today we’re showing our appreciation to the developers who’ve taken the time to build powerful alarm clock applications, and are currently offering them for free!

–College Alarm Clock (Homepage)–

Windows only
This alarm clock is particularly useful for people that have different schedules each day of the week, and as the name implies the target audience is college students. Using it is simple: download and run the program… there’s nothing to install. After that you can start tinkering around with the different configuration options.

You’ll quickly notice that there are 7 tabs spread out across the top for each day of the week. For each day you can designate a different time that coincides with your schedule, which for college students works out perfectly. It doesn’t exactly have a fancy interface, but it can be rather handy if your schedule varies throughout the week.

–Alarm Clock 2 (Homepage)–

Mac only
This is a powerful alarm application that is not only capable of handling alarms, but can also serve as a stopwatch or timer. I’d have to say that the best part is the fact that it’s able to wake your computer from sleep to sound your alarm. That’s great for anyone who doesn’t like to leave their computer running overnight.

Here are some of the other features that really make it stand out from the crowd:

• Set as many alarms as you want
• Set repeating alarms or one-time alarms
• Wake up to any song, playlist or podcast in your iTunes library
• Wake up peacefully with “easy wake” – a configurable option that slowly increases the volume of your alarm over time

–TinyAlarm (Homepage)–

Mac only
The name of this program gives the impression that this is a basic run-of-the-mill alarm clock, but that’s not the case at all. It doesn’t integrate with your iTunes library like the previous application does, but it’s capable of doing most things people would want from an alarm clock:

• Choose from System sounds or sounds in your personal library
• Choose how many chimes sound when the alarm goes off
• Add a text reminder to alarms that get displayed in a Growl notification
• Fuzzy timers: Timers that are “Exact” will simply add the minutes or hours to the current time. Timers that are “About” (for example, “About 15 minutes”), are rounded off.

–Overview–

If you use an alarm clock on your computer we’d love to hear which one. The selection of free solutions seems to be dwindling, but hopefully that won’t be a growing trend.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on January 19, 2008 by CyberNet.

One user over at the Futuremark forum decided to do an unofficial speed comparison of Vista SP1 vs. XP SP2, and in the end he was pleasantly surprised by Vista’s performance. Here’s a rundown on some of the results:

• File extraction (extracting 3.9GB RAR with WinRAR)
• Vista: 2min 16sec
• XP: 2min 22sec
• Program load times
• Vista:
  Photoshop CS3: 2 secs
  OpenOffice: 1.5 secs
  Crysis: 26 secs
• XP:
  Photoshop CS3: 8.5 secs
  OpenOffice: 6.5 secs
  Crysis: 33 secs
• Crysis GPU-test (1280×1024)
• Vista (”High”, DX10, 64-bit): 35fps
• Vista (”High”, DX9, 64-bit): 37fps
• Vista (”High”, DX10, 32-bit): 35fps
• Vista (”High”, DX9, 32-bit): 36fps
• XP (”High”): 39fps

He did more tests, but I summed up the most important ones. Generally Vista took home the crown, except in the gaming arena. When it came to computer games, such as Crysis, Vista was no match for what XP had to offer.

He concluded his results with a chart of what a difference having SuperFetch enabled in Vista makes. As many of you know Vista uses a new technology called SuperFetch to store your most used programs and data into memory when your computer starts up. I’ve had several people ask how they can disable the feature, but maybe these startup times (in seconds) will make you think otherwise:

–Facts from Microsoft–

Bill Gates announced back in January that there are over 100 million copies of Vista on computers that are being used around the world, and that’s a pretty big milestone for the young operating system. Over the last year Microsoft has been able to collect some significant stats in hopes of persuading more users to make the upgrade to Vista, many of which were collected from participants of the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program. Here’s an overview of their findings:

• Majority of Windows Vista-based PCs boot in less than a minute.
• Majority of all Windows Vista-based PCs resume from sleep in less than 6 seconds.
• Windows ReadyBoost is a terrific new innovation in Windows Vista that lets you speed up your system in seconds, and PCs running Windows Vista that are equipped with 512 MB memory experience a performance boost of up to 40 percent.
• Windows Vista users generally experience 20 percent fewer application “hangs” than those running Windows XP.
• Based on their first 180 days of availability, Windows Vista has been shown to have fewer vulnerabilities than Windows XP or Mac OS X 10.4.
• Windows Vista security has improved so much that PCs running it are 60 percent less likely to be infected with viruses, worms, and rootkits than PCs running Windows XP SP2.
• And Windows Vista-based PCs are over 90 percent less likely to be infected than systems running Windows XP without a Service Pack.
• Windows Vista-based PCs are almost three times less likely to be infected with potentially unwanted software than Windows XP-based PCs because of Vista shipping with Windows Defender.
• Internet Explorer 7 is now blocking nearly 1 million attempts to access these fake sites per week. New phishing attacks are more than 25 times as common as new viruses. That’s right, over 20,000 of these fake websites are created every month.

Out of all those stats I would have to say that the most impressive is the one about phishing protection in Internet Explorer 7. I would have never guessed that it protects a million attempts to access phishing sites every week, and I’m glad that I’ve upgraded all of the “computer illiterate” people I know to that version. Because they are likely the ones who would fall for the scams.

[via WinBeta here and here]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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