Earth Day: Use Technology to Reduce Your Home Energy Use

Your appliances and devices may be sucking you dry while you sleep. In fact, the idle charger you keep plugged into the wall is drinking up electrical juice and probably costing you a few extra cents right this second. This is what we call "vampire energy" (sometimes referred to as "phantom power").

It's not new; energy efficiency programs have been spending billions for years to make consumers aware of just how much they're spending (and wasting) on electricity. Maybe it's even working. A couple of years ago the Institute for Electric Efficiency (IEE) reported that in 2011 energy efficiency programs in the United States saved 107 terawatt hours of energy nationwide compared with the previous year. That's enough to power almost 9.3 million homes for a year. (Earth Day bonus: that in turn saved 75 million metric tons of carbon dioxide generation at power plants.)

Utility companies offer many programs and tools to get you started; these programs comprised 86 percent of the savings mentioned above according to the IEE. If your company offers tools for saving power you'll save both money and energy, the latter of which could go to others who need it more...

Read full story...

Advice for struggling PC software vendors

Despite all the headlines where teenage app makers sell their barely pubescent products for millions, being an independent software vendor — especially in the old-school PC world — is not an easy gig.

I'm talking especially about the makers of specialty PC software, particularly those who make what we used to call "utilities" or "power tools." In a world where PC sales drop precipitously, and our operating system makers seem to be dumbing everything down to an Angry Birds least common denominator, makers of deep, rich power tools are having some dog days.

These are the makers of the incredibly feature-rich text editor, developers of the screen capture program with 400 feature, authors of the thumbnail viewer that's really a full digital asset manager, creators of the file copy program that has more features buried in its graphical UI than the Linux shell has in all its arcane commands, and coders of the development environment that can do the craziest sorts of cross-platform live debugging.

Many of these vendors have been in business for a decade or more. They've been making money on one main piece of software and have continued to refine it, improve it, add customer-requested features, and chugged along, providing a unique value to a select set of customers with unique needs...

Read full story...

Windows XP's looming retirement won't shake PC business out of sales funk

Computerworld - The looming retirement of Windows XP won't stem the dramatic drop in PC sales this year, but it may help bolster Microsoft's revenue, analysts said today.

Although experts expect some business laggards to buy new hardware as they try to replace the 12-year-old XP before it's retired in April 2014, the quantities won't be enough to move the PC shipment needle to the positive side of the meter.

"Replacements for Windows XP won't be enough to offset the declines on the consumer side," said David Daoud, an analyst with IDC.

Earlier this week, both IDC and rival Gartner released estimates of PC shipments for the first quarter. Both said sales had plummeted, with IDC pegging the contraction at 14%, a record in the 19 years since the firm began tracking shipments. Much of that decline was due to consumers ignoring new Windows 8 PCs, said IDC...

Read full story...

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...






Read full story...

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...

Read full story...

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...

Read full story...

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...

Read full story...