Category: Computers, Science & Technology

Well, you would think so anyway!

Check it out! It is funny!

So, sounds like they are doing OK. They sold 4 million copies the first day, and in the first month 40 Million… not too shabby.

Windows 8 – 40 Million Licenses Sold

“As we pass the one month anniversary of the general availability of Windows 8, we are pleased to announce that to-date Microsoft has sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses. Tami Reller shared this news with industry and financial analysts, investors and media today at the Credit Suisse 2012 Annual Technology Conference. Windows 8 is outpacing Windows 7 in terms of upgrades. We built Windows 8 to work great on existing Windows 7 PCs. And we also set out to make upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 8 super easy.

From Tami’s presentation:

‘The journey is just beginning, but I am pleased to announce today that we have sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses so far.’

The launch of Windows 8 at the end of October also saw the grand opening of the Windows Store. There were more apps in the Windows Store at launch than any other app store at their launch and since then, the number of apps in the Windows Store has doubled. A number of apps in the Windows Store have crossed the $25,000 revenue mark and the developer keeps 80% of the revenue they make off downloads for the life of their app. A lot of great new apps have been added to the Windows Store since launch such as CBS, ABC News, ABC Family, Engadget, Flixster, OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network), Vimeo and my (current) personal favorite – Top Gear.”

Keeping a stiff upper lip, the British vote is in… not so interested in Windows 8! But, they might buy a Windows 8 tablet.

Less than half of British web users want Windows 8

“A new survey of British web users has shown a less than stellar appetite for the new Windows 8 operating system.

Toluna QuickSurveys received 2,000 responses from a broad internet survey of Britons and found that only 13.5 per per cent said they were ‘very likely’ to upgrade to the new Microsoft OS.

25.1 per cent of users said they would be ‘quite likely’ to upgrade to Windows 8. That leaves over 60 per cent of respondents who were either unlikely or very unlikely to upgrade, or just didn’t care either way.

Perhaps more tellingly for the PC industry as a whole, which is banking on Windows 8 to revive its fortunes, almost half of all those surveyed had no intention of buying a new PC in the next year.

Windows 7 still king

The study also asked users of their preferred choice of operating system. 14 per cent of respondents selected Windows 8, while 28 per cent opted for Windows 7.

This is likely down to the continued popularity of Windows 7 among users. Earlier this week we learned that only 1 per cent of PCs are running the new OS almost a month after it went on sale.

However, the report wasn’t all doom and gloom for Microsoft. When asked about tablet purchases, 13 per cent said they’d buy a Windows 8 tablet – the same number who mentioned iOS and Android tablets.”

They are ramping up on the number of available Windows 8 apps, and many, actually most, are free!

Windows 8 store adds 7,000 apps in two weeks to pass 20,000 mark, almost 18,000 are free

“The Windows Store in Windows 8 has passed 20,000 apps. It’s not clear exactly when it happened, but Win App Update, which keeps track of the totals, posted on Thursday that the milestone was likely reached on Tuesday.

The last time we covered Windows 8’s store, it was at 12,895 apps on November 5. This means some 7,715 apps were added in the last 17 days. That’s more than 453 apps per day, which means the store’s growth is once again accelerating (Windows 8 was sucking down a firm 500 apps daily after its launch, but it had dropped to the 300s more recently).

At this rate, the Windows 8 store will easily pass the 30,000 mark before the end of the year, and may even near 40,000 apps. This is to be expected as the holiday season nears and developers start preparing to ride the Windows 8 wave. There will be millions of Windows 8 devices sold this month and next, so it makes sense app creators want to take advantage.

It looks like Microsoft is doing just fine on the quantity side of things. 20,000 apps is pretty damn good for a new store to achieve so quickly. Quality, on the other hand, is a different story, and will take much longer to improve.”

Now THIS is cool! Dreamworks animation tool was used to great effect in the new “Rise of the Guardians” movie! Now they are giving the code away! This is a great addition to the Open Source community!

DreamWorks makes ‘Rise of the Guardians’ special effects tool open source

“Yesterday DreamWorks released its latest animated feature with the holiday-themed Rise of the Guardians. But for animators who watch the film and wish they could do something similar, there’s good news — one of the tools used on the project is free and open source. Called OpenVDB, the tool is used to create volumetric 3D effects like smoke, and DreamWorks previously used it on both Puss in Boots and Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted. The studio’s hope is that by making OpenVDB free, it will eventually become an industry standard. ‘That ends up benefiting us,’ DreamWorks’ David Prescott told the Wall Street Journal.

The plan to go open source was originally announced this summer, and according to DreamWorks’ David Lipton, OpenVDB allows special effects teams to ‘overcome the memory limitations to which other data formats are subject.’ Just don’t expect animation house to start making all of its tools so readily available. ‘There’s other stuff that we’ve developed in house that we’re like, ‘No, you’re not getting that,” Prescott told the WSJ. You can learn more about OpenVDB at its official site.”

From the Dreamworks Press Release:

DreamWorks Animation SKG, Inc. (Nasdaq: DWA) today announced the launch of OpenVDB (openvdb.org), a previously proprietary sparse volume data format, to the Open Source community. OpenVDB enables a dramatic increase in the scale of achievable volumetric effects.

‘DreamWorks Animation’s technology in the hands of our artists has created our rich, iconic characters and worlds. Our OpenVDB technology in particular has been the focus of intense industry interest,’ said Dr. Lincoln Wallen, Head of Animation Technology at DreamWorks Animation. ‘We have benefitted from using Open Source, and we are pleased to contribute back into the Open Source community in sharing OpenVDB.'”

Microsoft’s DropBox alternative, SkyDrive, is ramping up. I hooked up mine in my Windows 8 build on my laptop, but I still, personally use DropBox!

By the way, if you would like to connect with DropBox, do me a favor (to give me space credit) and do it by clicking here: https://db.tt/vRTI68D

SkyDrive usage has doubled in the last 6 months, now you can select what to sync

“About 6 months ago, we released the first sync apps for SkyDrive making it easy to view and manage your personal SkyDrive from the File Explorer in Windows and Finder in OS X. We’re excited to announce that since then, you have put more and more of your files into your own SkyDrive and in the last 6 months, you’ve doubled the amount of SkyDrive storage being used.

We’re both humbled and excited by this pace of growth. While many of you have told us that you love being able to have everything in one place and access it from anywhere, you’ve also said that sometimes you want to be more selective with the files you sync to each device. So today, we’re releasing an update to our sync apps that includes the ability to select what you sync along with the ability to share files and folders right from the Windows File Explorer. In addition, we’ve just released a few updates to the SkyDrive apps for Windows Phone and Android improving how you access your SkyDrive across different devices. Between these updates and the way SkyDrive comes with Windows 8 and the new Office, we’re excited to see how fast your SkyDrive storage usage will grow in the next 6 months.

Select what to sync

With today’s release, you can now select which folders from SkyDrive are synced – making it easier to use SkyDrive with laptops or tablets with small drives. You’re in control. If you’d like to keep all your photos and documents in SkyDrive but only sync a folder of your most important documents to your laptop, you can do that – even if your desktop is syncing the full set. You can choose specific sub-folders to sync as well; you aren’t limited to your primary SkyDrive folders.”

Go NC State! Researchers there have come up with a cool way to increase WiFi speed in existing routers via a software upgrade! As much as 700%! How cool is that?

The end of slow public WiFi? Researchers develop new protocol that boosts WiFi performance by 700%

“Conferences, airports, cafes – they might offer free WiFi to visitors, but they are often sluggish in their operation because everyone else is hogging the connection.

This issue might become a thing of the past, after a team of engineers at NC State University (NCSU) announced the development of WiFox (via ExtremeTech), a new software protocol that could theoretically be added to existing Internet routers and is capable of boosting WiFi performance by 700 percent.

Traditionally, routers offer a single channel of data to users. When the access point receives an increased number of data requests, it becomes harder for it to send back the data it has requested. The access point could be programmed to give all pieces of data a high priority to clear its backlog, but then users have issues submitting new requests.

Data backs up, and the router has issues dishing out the necessary information to users. You may have experienced this when you turn up early to a conference, enjoy the public WiFi connection, and then get kicked off when the venue starts to fill up and you have to share it with everyone else.

NCSU engineers position WiFox as the software equivalent of a traffic policeman, ensuring that the data traffic moves smoothly in both directions. WiFox works by monitoring the traffic on a WiFi channel, intelligently detecting load issues and granting access to priority data when it detects a backlog of information passing backwards and forwards.

The team says that when they tested the software on a router in their labs capable of handling 45 users, it saw improvements of between 400 and 700 percent when it reached the maximum number of users. On average, the router was able to respond to data requests four times faster than a router that didn’t utilize the protocol.

Purely software based, WiFox has the potential to change the way heavily-trafficked routers operate around the world.

The NCSU team intends to present its research paper at the ACM CoNEXT 2012 conference held in Nice, France in December – from a purely selfish point of view, we hope it makes it into the access points offered by various technology companies at their product launches.”

My favorite office suite has a brand spanking new release!

LibreOffice

“The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 3.6.3, for Windows, MacOS and Linux. This new release is another step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability for any kind of deployment, on personal desktops or inside organizations and companies of any size.

LibreOffice has quickly become the de facto standard for migrations to free office suites, thanks to the growing feature set and the improved interoperability with proprietary software. Instrumental for the overall progress is the growing developer base, which has just reached the number of 550 since the launch of the project, making LibreOffice one of the fastest growing free software projects of the decade.

After the City of Munich and the French Government, which are migrating from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice, it is now the turn of several provinces in Italy, including the largest one in term of inhabitants. In addition, there are many private companies switching to LO, like the largest furniture manufacturer and retailer in Romania, with 1,000 Windows and GNU/Linux desktops.”

Happy 8th Birthday, Firefox!

From Mashable:

“On November 9 2004, eight years ago today, the Mozilla foundation launched the first version of Firefox.

This anniversary may be confusing for some, as we’ve recently compiled a timeline of Firefox’s first 10 years. This is because the browser that would eventually become Firefox, called Phoenix, was actually launched as a beta in 2002. When the first full version of the browser was launched in 2004, it was renamed to Firefox.

Mozilla’s open source browser was seen as a breath of fresh air at the time when Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 dominated the market share, annoying many users with its numerous security issues.

Over the years, Firefox captured a sizable chunk of the market share from Internet Explorer, but in the last couple of years it has gotten some very serious competition in the form of Google’s Chrome and others. Currently, Firefox is the world’s third most popular browser, behind IE and Chrome.

For the future, Mozilla plans several important features, including a Windows 8-ready version of Firefox, as well as the Social API, which will enable integration of Facebook and other social networks with the browser.”

$50,000.00 for an exploit that allows an open exploit of your PC via Adobe Reader. Ouch. This is one reason I use Sumatra PDF!

Adobe investigating Reader X security hole allegedly selling on the black market for $50,000

Emil Protalinski of The Next Web, reports: “Just one day after Adobe patched flaws in its Flash Player software for Windows, OS X, Linux, and Android, Group IB security researchers claim to have discovered a 0-day security hole in Adobe Reader X which can execute shellcode with the help of malformed PDF-documents using specially crafted forms. Furthermore, the vulnerability code is already on sale on the black market for ‘approximately 30 000 – 50 000 USD’ although it’s apparently only being distributed in ‘small circles of the underground.’ For its part, Adobe says it is investigating.

Here’s the proof of concept (reportedly limited to Windows):

Andrey Komarov, the Head of International Projects Department of Group-IB, explains that the big deal is because the vulnerability allows you to jump out of the sandbox, which was first introduced in Adobe Reader X:

The vulnerability has some limitations, for example it could be successfully exploited only after the user will close the browser and restart it. Another variant is to organize interaction between the victim and the malformed PDF-document. Either way, the vulnerability is has very significant vector to be spread with bypassing of internal Adobe X sandbox, which is appealing for cybercrime gangs because in the past there was no documented method of how to bypass it with shellcode execution.

In other words, on its own it doesn’t amount to much. That being said, if this flaw is chained together with another one, and we all know problematic Adobe’s products have been in recent years when it comes to security, it won’t be pretty.

In fact, Group IB claims the vulnerability is already included in a new custom version of the Blackhole Exploit Kit, the most popular Web threat tool for distributing various other types of malware with the help of many different types of exploits. The official version, however, doesn’t have it, but it will soon, according to Brian Krebs.

Contacted via instant message, the author of the Black Hole exploit kit said today that he also had confirmed the existence of a private Adobe Reader exploit that was being sold in closed circles. He noted that although his kit currently does not include the exploit, he is hoping to acquire it and add it soon.

The thought of this alone makes me want to recommend that you avoid using Adobe Reader unless you absolutely have to (I personally use Foxit). At the very least, use an alternative until Adobe gets to the bottom of this.

Unfortunately, the company says it was not contacted by Group-IB and thus is unable to verify whether this 0-day exists. An Adobe spokesperson told The Next Web:

We saw the announcement from Group IB, but we haven’t seen or received any details. Adobe PSIRT has reached out to Group-IB. Without additional details, there is nothing we can do, unfortunately, beyond continuing to monitor the threat landscape and working with our partners in the security community, as always.

Now we wait.”