Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Report: Microsoft Readying RT Version of 'Windows Blue'

Microsoft is reportedly hard at work on Windows Blue, the follow-up to the recently released Windows 8 operating system, and ZDNet reported Monday that there will be a Windows RT version of the platform.

A Windows Blue build identified as "number 9364" that leaked on the Internet this weekend is "real and is a direct internal engineering build, current as of the past week or so," according to ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley, who cited unnamed "trusted sources."

The leaked build refers to the following SKUs, according to MSFTKitchen (in fact, these references are among the few files in the leaked build that specifically refer to "Blue"):

    Windows Blue RT
    Windows Blue Personal
    Windows Blue Professional
    Windows Blue Standard Server
    Windows Blue Enterprise Server
    Windows Blue Datacenter Server
    Windows Blue Web Server...






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Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Seagate Hits Milestone with 2 Billionth Hard Drive

Seagate has announced that it has built its two-billionth hard drive. Seagate was founded in 1979; it took 29 years for them to ship their first billion hard drives. Since then, many applications have greatly increased the demand for storage. Particularly thanks to social media, cloud storage, and business computing, it only took Seagate four years to build another billion hard drives. As such, in 2013, Seagate is celebrating the shipment with its two-billionth hard drive...

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Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Can Samsung innovate?

 As with the semiconductors used in memory and screens, which gradually increase in complexity with each generation, the current wave of smartphones and tablets can be seen as a steady progression. Each new model gets thinner, with better screens and faster processors, plus hardware add-ons such as NFC (near field communication) chips, but the overall concept doesn’t change.

“Samsung is like the Japanese companies when they were at the their peak, pumping out tech products for cheaper and cheaper,” said Hiroyuki Shimizu, an analyst at Gartner.

Shimizu said one way out of this spiral is software, but Samsung has had little success in developing its own. The company has largely abandoned its Bada OS, first announced in 2010, and is almost entirely dependent on Android for core content like maps, apps and video.

“Samsung emphasizes speed and execution. But this is contradictory to creativity. If you want speed and execution, you don’t expect to create something new,” said Chang. “Software is more individual and requires out-of-box thinking.”

Still, Samsung has opened up new segments of the smartphone market...

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Friday, March 8, 2013

Why Microsoft's Surface RT Will Flop

Microsoft's Surface RT recently took a hit when Samsung halted its sales in Germany, but that's not the reason this tablet will soon bite the dust.

The Surface RT is going to fail in the market mainly because of its steep price. Microsoft is not willing to lowball the product in a competitive market even though it can easily afford to subsidize the machine and sell it for $200, rather than the $780 it goes for in Germany. This is simply too much money.

And, of course, Microsoft has no clue about marketing this device because it looks and feels like a Windows 8 machine though it is not.

I think this sort of look-alike marketing would have flown in 1997, when the computer-using public was smarter. But ever since the dot-com crash and the subsequent failure of many computer magazines, the public has been becoming dumber in matters of computing and how things actually work. The younger generations do not care about chips anymore and they look at all the devices as superficial appliances. Thus, when they see the Surface RT "Windows" machine, they do not understand why regular Microsoft Word does not work on it...

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