Category: Computers, Science & Technology

I would REALLY love to get on-board the Millennium Falcon.

Star Wars-Themed Lands Coming to Disney Parks

StarWars.com – “Today at the D23 EXPO 2015, The Walt Disney Company Chairman and CEO Bob Iger announced to an audience of more than 7,500 fans that Star Wars-themed lands will be coming to Disneyland park in Anaheim, California and Disney’s Hollywood Studios at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida, allowing Star Wars fans to step into the stories from a galaxy far, far away.

Ambitious plans to bring Star Wars to life in the two parks include creating Disney’s largest single-themed land expansions ever at 14-acres each, transporting guests to a never-before-seen planet, a remote trading port and one of the last stops before wild space where Star Wars characters and their stories come to life.

‘I am thrilled to announce the next chapter in the long and exciting history between Disney Parks and Star Wars,’ said Iger. ‘Through each new attraction and new land we create, we push the boundaries of what is possible. And as you can imagine, with Star Wars, we are taking that to a whole new level, with a whole galaxy to explore.’

These authentic lands will have two signature attractions, including the ability to take the controls of one of the most recognizable ships in the galaxy, the Millennium Falcon, on a customized secret mission, and an epic Star Wars adventure that puts guests in the middle of a climactic battle.”

I, of course, am pleased!

NPD: Chromebooks outsell Windows laptops

“Many people have resisted the idea that Chromebooks really were growing in popularity. Now, less five years after the first commercial Chromebook, the Samsung Series 5 and Acer Chromebook went on sale, NPD, the global retail research group, is reporting that Chromebook sales in June and early July had exceeded ‘sales of Windows notebooks … passing the 50 percent market share threshold.’

Overall, according to NPD, ‘Chromebook sales through the U.S. B2B channels increased 43 percent during the first half of 2015.’ For retailers and resellers this was good news because it helped to keep overall Business to Business (B2B) PC and tablet sales from falling.

This comes after a year, 2014, when Google OS-equipped, Android and Chrome, devices saw a 29 percent increase, propelled primarily by Chromebook sales, while Apple devices, mostly iPads, dropped by 12 percent and Windows devices, largely laptops, declined by 8 percent.

So far this year, Chromebooks have made notebooks the strongest B2B corporate client devices. Overall Chromebooks sales are up in U.S. B2B channels by 43 percent.

It wasn’t just Chromebooks selling well. Apple MacBook sales increased 27 percent year-to-date while Windows laptops grew 3 percent.

If you still think the PC is dead and that tablets will rule, think again. NPD numbers prove that IT pros and businesses are still buying laptops.

As NPD VP of industry analysis Stephen Baker said in a statement, ‘In B2B channels the notebook remains the device of choice for the vast amount of purchasers, with sales volumes more than triple that of tablets. For B2B productivity and the best mix of affordability, form and function, the notebook remains the workhorse device purchased through B2B channels for businesses, education, and government organizations.’

Overall, sales of PCs and tablets via US channels were flat. That’s in large part because even though tablets sales slowed their decline, they were still down 7 percent following this market’s 12 percent decline in the first half of 2014. In specific, iPads dropped nearly 20 percent and Android Tablets 8 percent, but Windows tablets, the Surface in particular, grew by 35 percent over the prior year.

On the other hand, Surface tablet numbers weren’t that big to begin with. For example, Microsoft sold a million Surfaces in Microsoft’s 2nd quarter of 2015, while Apple sold 21.5 million iPads over the same quarter.

In short, for businesses, tablets are on the decline and laptops are rising once again. As Baker observed, ‘Windows was not impacted by the upcoming release of Windows 10, MacBooks grew the most of any platform, and Google saw Chrome rise to take the number one spot in market share. All these results continue to point to strong channel demand for PCs and continue to belie the notion that any other devices are threatening the long-term business case for the notebook.’

While B2B devices sales are only a sliver of the overall computer market, these results signal a significant trend. It will be interesting to see just how broadly Chromebooks are deployed in enterprise settings beyond education.”

Ubuntu One Cloud Service was closed source, but since Ubuntu closed it, they have opened the code!

Ubuntu’s shuttered cloud storage system now open source

Ars Technica – By: Jon Brodkin – “Canonical gave up on operating its Ubuntu One cloud storage service more than a year ago, but this week it released the system’s file-syncing code under an open source AGPLv3 license.

Though Canonical is primarily known for its open source Ubuntu operating system, it also has some closed source products and services, including Ubuntu One.

‘Today, we’re happy to be open sourcing the biggest piece of our Ubuntu One file syncing service,’ Canonical Director of Online Services Martin Albisetti wrote. ‘The code we’re releasing is the server side of what desktop clients connected to when syncing local or remote changes. This is code where most of the innovation and hard work went throughout the years, where we faced most of the scaling challenges and the basis on which other components were built upon.’
Canonical hopes the code will be ‘useful for developers to read through, fork into their own projects or pick out useful bits and pieces.’

The code is available on Canonical’s Launchpad, along with instructions on starting a server and client. There is more Ubuntu One ‘code related to the website, REST APIs, contacts and music streaming,’ which will also be released as open source at a later date.

As for why it took more than a year to release the code, Albisetti explained that ‘[o]ur engineering team was tasked with supporting the release of the phone and then the now announced Snappy project. The team cared deeply about open sourcing this code and spent time wherever they could spare in moving it forward, cleaning up the code so it would work enough outside of the very specific production environment and untangle it of some commercial code that was used at some point.’

Canonical has been working on a version of Ubuntu for smartphones for at least two-and-a-half years now, with limited success. The first Ubuntu phones from hardware maker BQ went on sale in Europe in February of this year. Those phones are now on sale globally, but operate on frequencies that aren’t compatible with high-speed networks in the US.”

If you are using Kaspersky Internet Security, you need to go to their web site and download the version that works with Windows 10. If you don’t, you won’t get a warning, but it does not work after the upgrade! I found out on my own machine. This may be true of many applications, though, it is a good idea to make sure that you upgrade all your apps after you upgrade to Windows 10.

Oh. Wow. 16 TB in an SSD! Want. Need. Drool.

Samsung takes “world’s largest storage drive” crown with 16TB SSD

PC World – By: Jared Newman – “Samsung has figured out how to supersize solid state storage with a whopping 16TB SSD.

At that size, Samsung has taken the lead for world’s largest storage drive, even compared to hard disk storage. Last year, Seagate and Western Digital released 8TB and 10TB HDDs, respectively, while Fixstars announced a 6TB SSD just a few months ago. Samsung’s new drive fits within a 2.5-inch enclosure, so in theory it could find its way into laptops and desktop PCs.

As usual with insanely large storage drives, however, Samsung is targeting the server market first. At this year’s Flash Memory Summit, the company showed off 48 of the new drives in a server with storage totaling 768TB, Golem.de reports. The drives are fast as well, rated at two million input/output operations per second. As Ars Technica notes, conventional PC drives tend to handle 10,000 to 90,000 of those operations per second.

We might have seen this coming, as Samsung was touting a major upgrade to its 3D NAND flash chips just a few days ago. With the new 48-layer, 3-bit V-NAND technology, Samsung doubled the density of its current flash chips to 256Gb. The company said it could ‘easily double the capacity of Samsung’s existing SSD line-ups, and provide an ideal solution for multi-terabyte SSDs.’

That’s not to say Samsung will stay king of the storage hill for too long. Earlier this month, SanDisk announced its own 256Gb, 3-bit-per-cell, 48-layer 3D NAND flash chips in partnership with Toshiba. While they haven’t announced any products yet, SanDisk said last year that it was hoping to launch a 16TB SSD in 2016.

The impact on you at home: Given that Samsung hasn’t even announced a release date for its 16TB drive, it’ll be a while before you can even think about putting this kind of solid state storage in your PC. But even today, we’re seeing some of this technology trickle down to the consumer market. Right now, you can pick up a 1TB SSD with Samsung’s 3D V-NAND tech for $360, or a 2TB drive for $750. The underlying advancements will continue to force prices downward, so it’s not hard to imagine solid state covering most storage needs before too long.”

You should download it now! It is cleaner and more modern. I immediately installed it on all my systems!

LibreOffice 5.0

“LibreOffice is a powerful office suite; its clean interface and powerful tools let you unleash your creativity and grow your productivity. LibreOffice embeds several applications that make it the most powerful Free & Open Source Office suite on the market: Writer, the word processor, Calc, the spreadsheet application, Impress, the presentation engine, Draw, our drawing and flowcharting application, Base, our database and database frontend, and Math for editing mathematics.”

Comparison of Features between Microsoft Office 2013 and LibreOffice

Berlin, August 5, 2015 – “The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 5.0, the tenth major release since the launch of the project and the first of the third development cycle. LibreOffice is a full feature open source office suite which compares head to head with every product in the same category, while it stands out for superior interoperability features.

LibreOffice 5.0 builds on the success of the 4.x family, which has been deployed by over 80 million users (source: TDF estimate, based on users pinging for updates), including large organizations in Europe and South America.

LibreOffice 5.0 sports a significantly improved user interface, with a better management of the screen space and a cleaner look. In addition, it offers better interoperability with office suites such as Microsoft Office and Apple iWork, thanks to new and improved filters to handle non standard formats. Other improvements have been added to every module of the suite, and Windows 64bit builds (Vista and later) have been added.

A new version for new endeavours: LibreOffice 5.0 is the cornerstone of the mobile clients on Android and Ubuntu Touch, as well as the upcoming cloud version. As such, LibreOffice 5.0 serves as the foundation of current developments and is a great platform to extend, innovate and collaborate!

A beautiful office suite designed by a fantastic community: With new icons and major improvements to menus and sidebar, LibreOffice looks nicer and helps users in being creative and getting things done the right way. In addition, style management is now more intuitive thanks to the visual preview of styles right in the interface.

Spreadsheets that rock: LibreOffice 5.0 ships with an impressive number of new and enhanced spreadsheet features: complex formulae, new functions, conditional formatting, image cropping, table addressing and much more. Calc’s blend of performance and features makes it an enterprise-ready, heavy duty spreadsheet capable of handling all kinds of workload for an impressive range of use cases.

Better filters for better documents: LibreOffice 5 ships with many improvements to document import and export filters, for an enhanced document conversion fidelity all around. In addition, it is now possible to timestamp PDF files generated with LibreOffice.

A complete list of the most significant new features is available on the accompanying press release, and has also been published on the website at the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/new-features/.

LibreOffice 5.0 has also been improved ‘under the hood,’ thanks to the precious work of hundreds of volunteers. According to Coverity Scan, the number of defects for 1,000 lines of code is now consistently below 0,001. This translates into an open source office suite which is not only easier to develop but it’s also easier to maintain and debug. In fact, the amount of solved bugs is now over 25,000, and is increasing rapidly.

Last, but not least, LibreOffice 5.0 has been improved in terms of quality and stability thanks to a large number of tests performed on new builds by going through thousands of documents to spot crashers, bugs and regressions.

‘In 2010, we inherited a rather old source code, which had to be made cleaner, leaner and smarter before we could reasonably develop the office suite we were envisioning for the long term,’ says Michael Meeks, a Director at TDF and a leading LibreOffice developer. ‘Since 2010, we have gone through three different development cycles: the 3.x family, to clean the code from legacy stuff; the 4.x family, to make the suite more responsive; and the 5.x family, to make it smarter, also in terms of user interface.’

A summary of what has happened “under the hood” of LibreOffice 5.0 is available here: https://users.freedesktop.org/~michael/under-the-hood-5-0.html.

‘LibreOffice 5.0 is such a good product that people used to legacy open source office suites feel overwhelmed by the amount of new features and improvements,’adds Thorsten Behrens, TDF Chairman and leading LibreOffice developer. ‘Switching from any OOo derivative to LibreOffice is a giant leap into the future of free office suites.'”

There is a secret trick in your new Windows 10 PC! “Right-Click” on your Desktop and create a regular Folder on your Desktop in Windows 10. Then change the folder name to this exact string:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Be sure to paste EXACTLY the string above as the name of the folder. The folder icon will change and you will get lot’s of “God Mode” settings in the contents of the folder. Weird but cool!

Smartwatches are definitely changing the watch industry!

Smartwatches Decimated Traditional Watch Sales Last Month

Techcrunch – By: John Biggs – “An NPD survey is suggesting that the Apple Watch has pushed watch sales to the lowest point since 2008. NPD has found that watchmakers sold $375 million worth of watches in July, down 11 percent from last year.

This decline is the largest since a similar decline in 2008 due to the financial crisis.

The suggestion that Apple had something to do with this is, at this point, specious. However, I would argue that the entire gamut of smartwatches – from Pebble, Motorola, Fitbit and Apple – are putting a serious dent in the fashion watch market.

Summer is traditionally a tough time for watchmakers. Kids have graduated so there are no Rolexen to be bought. There are few holidays in these fallow months and, barring a bit of duty-free tourist trade, there are few opportunities for folks to pick up anything new.

Furthermore, the industry has been fairly low-key over the past year in reaction to confusing consumer demand. The Sistem 51 by Swatch has gained a certain notoriety in the low-end market, but other manufacturers have priced themselves up and out of the fashion world, forcing them to work in cyclical holiday markets.

Ultimately the watch industry is up against the wall. When faced with the choice between a Fossil and a Fitbit, I suspect the average tech-savvy buyer would buy the fitness band. While this should leave watch lovers aghast, it’s the state of things and it will soon be the new normal.”

Samsung purchased Boxee back in 2013 for $30 million. It was a risk, and one that has, unfortunately, not paid off. Samsung has killed the Boxee Project and fired the Boxee Team. Wow. Harse.

Former Boxee CEO Avner Ronen left Samsung as well. They were trying to perfect the TV experience, instead, they got canned.