Peter Stack
Android 5.0 Lollipop has not reached all intended devices but Google's appears busy working on a new update to release soon. According to tips and leaks, the Android 5.1 will be coming soon with the Nexus 5 as possibly the first device in line.
The first hint about Google's upcoming Android 5.1 update came from an Android Police tipster. According to the tipster, people can expect obvious tweaks to the Android interface. These include changes in the Bluetooh and WiFi settings toggles/widgets. The Lollipop offers a Quick Settings menu allowing people to connect to devices or networks without accessing the entire list of settings.
For those who got confused with Google's Lollipop approach, the Android 5.1 will lower the notification shade to the device's Quick Settings menu. This means users can choose to turn off or on the Bluetooth or WiFi by tapping on the specified icons. They can also do so by tapping the labels "Bluetooth" or "WiFi" over accessing the menu.
The tipster also said that under Android 5.1, the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth text features an arrow down for additional functionality. Tapping on the arrow will show a series of Bluetooth devices or WiFi networks nearby. The new expandable functionality features allow people to switch or access connections without closing their apps or other tasks. To fee the full settings menu, they have to top on the "more settings" option.
The latest Geekbench test, on other hand, offers more support to the release of the Android 5.1. The firmware was spotted running on the LG Nexus 5 strengthening claims. Google always releases its Android updates first to flagship devices: the Nexus line. According to the results, the device scored 2997. This is a little higher but similar to the results of the Nexus 5 when tested against the Lollipop.
Google has not released the official details of the Android 5.1 update.
Source: http://au.ibtimes.com/google-android-51-update-release-nexus-5-launch-wifi-bluetooth-changes-plus-more-interesting-1422779
Microsoft is axing a much-loved feature of its Windows Phone OS, Rooms, at short notice. An email sent to users yesterday announced that support is ending next month – long before functionally equivalent replacements are in place.
Rooms was introduced with Windows Phone 8 in 2012, and allowed users to chat, share calendars, photos and to do lists. A "Family Room" is already created on the phone by default. The Tile-based UI of Windows Phone conveniently alerts users to updates, such as new appointments, shopping list items and images.
From next month, Microsoft says, users will not be able to create new Rooms, or add members to or delete them from existing Rooms. The feature will disappear entirely in Windows 10.
Users will be able to continue to work with the data in their Rooms - but only via three discrete websites: One Note, Calendar and One Drive. A user suggestion to save Rooms has already attracted some votes. Users voice concerns that Windows Phone is becoming less distinctive. "Stop trying to be just like the competition - keep being BETTER", writes one.
Microsoft is expected to enhance its Skype client to include the Rooms functionality – but only Microsoft knows when. We requested a comment from Microsoft, but had not heard back at press time.
With Windows 8.1 last year, Microsoft began to remove the tight integration that strongly differentiated Windows Phone from Android and iOS. For example, the phone nicely aggregated social media activity in the system, within Hubs and on contact cards. Now, it throws the user into a dedicated Twitter or Facebook app – a much clunkier experience.
Windows Phone users got an early indication that CEO Satya Nadella doesn't think differentiating the mobile platform is a priority when a Microsoft manager mused about porting Cortana to rival platforms. Nadella replaced his predecessors "Devices and Services" formulation with "Cloud-o-bile" – a race in which Cloud and Mobile both come first. Together. At the same time. Skipping over the finishing line, hand in hand. Nobody finishes second. Everybody is a winner.
Source: http://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-beefs-up-outlook-mobile-app/
Updates to the Outlook apps tweak swipe gestures on the Android version and improve security for Exchange users in both versions.
Microsoft has polished up its Outlook apps for iOS and Android just two weeks after their debut.
In a blog post Tuesday, Microsoft's Office 365 Team outlined the features available in an update to the mobile email apps. Some of the new features and changes affect only the iOS app or the Android app, while others affect both versions.
The Outlook apps -- rebranded versions of the Accompli e-mail app that Microsoft bought in December -- are the latest steps in Microsoft's push toward a greater presence in the mobile world.
In the past, Microsoft was shy about releasing its apps onto competing mobile platforms, such as iOS and Android. But CEO Satya Nadella has made it his mission to focus on the cloud and mobile markets as key areas for growth.
In one change, the mobile version of Outlook now handles IMAP, an email protocol supported by many major email providers, including AOL and Comcast. IMAP stores your emails on the server until you delete them, allowing you to access your latest messages from different devices and mail clients.
By default, Outlook sorts your email into conversation threads, so you can follow all related messages. But if you'd rather see each email individually, you can now change the setting. Simply tap the Settings icon, scroll down to the option for Organize Mail by Thread and turn it off. This feature isn't yet available for the Outlook app for Android, but Microsoft said it expects to bring it to Google's mobile OS soon.
Microsoft also now lets you customize swipe gestures on the Android flavor of Outlook just as you can on the iOS version. By swiping a specific email to the right or left, you can quickly delete it, archive it, move it, flag it, schedule it or mark it as read or unread. A setting called Swipe Options lets you choose which action to assign to a right or left swipe.
You can also now change the folders targeted in swipe gestures. In the past, Outlook asked you which folder you wanted to use when you archived or scheduled an email. Now you can set a default folder, so that Outlook will no longer prompt you.
Those of you who use Outlook with Exchange servers, which typically means business users and enterprise customers, will find more solid security in the update.
If your company uses Exchange ActiveSync to sync your email and other items and requires a password for the synchronization, Outlook will now prompt you to set up a passcode on your mobile device. Until that passcode is established, you won't be able to access your email. That sounds like a hassle, but it's designed to protect your email. Devices running iOS 8.0 or later come with built-in encryption. Outlook uses your passcode to encrypt all the data stored on your device.
And for Android users in the business world, Outlook can now enforce policies regarding the length and complexity of your password as well as the number of attempts someone can bypass the screen before your device is wiped.
Source: http://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-beefs-up-outlook-mobile-app/
Apple may bring its Touch ID fingerprint sensor to Mac laptops and desktops in the future, according to a new rumour from Taiwanese website Apple.club.tw, as reported by 9to5Mac.
The website claims Apple might integrate the fingerprint scanner in the trackpad of its rumoured 12-inch MacBook Air and next-generation MacBook Pro.
For desktop computers like the iMac, Mac Pro, and Mac Mini, Apple is likely to put Touch ID in its Magic Mouse or Magic Trackpad.
There’s also a chance we’ll see new colour options for the purported 12-inch MacBook Air, according to the report. This could include silver, space grey, and gold just like Apple’s more recent iPhones.
It’s unclear whether or not the blog’s sources are legitimate. But, as 9to5Mac’s Mark Gurman pointed out, Apple.club.tw did publish early photos of the iPad Air 2′s Touch ID and the A8X chip that powers Apple’s latest iPads in the fall.
If Apple does bring Touch ID to the Mac, it’s probably part of a push to further promote Apple Pay. And as Gurman also notes, Apple will have to make sure it’s just as secure as it is on the iPhone. Touch ID’s functionality is based on a secure element within Apple’s A-series chips that power its iPhones and iPads, which keep financial transactions safe. Apple will have to create the same experience on the Mac.
We’re expecting to learn more about Apple’s future additions to the Mac line later this year. The company has been rumoured to be working on a 12-inch MacBook Air with a Retina display and an even thinner design than the current model.
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com.au/apple-touch-id-coming-to-macbook-air-rumor-2015-2
The Apple Watch is coming very soon, with a launch date of April offered by none other than Apple CEO Tim Cook, so understandably, the supply chain is moving to meet initial demand. Apple has ordered between five and six million devices to be produced in preparation for the kick-off of sales, the Wall Street Journal reports today, a figure which puts Apple’s expected demand for its first wearable somewhere close to initial expectations for the original iPad.
Apple’s smartwatch is expected by many to obliterate the existing appetite for wearables from other manufacturers, and an initial order of 5 million would indeed reveal anticipated sales far above the estimated 720,000 devices across all Android Wear manufacturers the occurred during the entirety of 2014. But Apple is also nimble with its order and supply chain structure, so this could change quickly depending on whether we see far more or far fewer shoppers flock to the Apple Watch upon its release.
Apple’s distribution of sales is another factor that separates this launch from others, in addition to the brand new product category. The Apple Watch is being sold in three lines, with an Apple Watch Sport occupying the entry-level, the Apple Watch taking up the middle ground and the Apple Watch Edition occupying a potentially stratospheric upper price range. The WSJ report says that half of initial production is geared at the Sport, which will be priced starting at $349, with one-third dedicated to the Apple Watch and the remaining orders dedicated to the expensive Edition models, the cases of which include solid 18-karat gold construction.
The Apple Watch is a brand new category for Apple, and it also requires that users already own an iPhone in order to use the device, so initial sales are unlikely to anywhere close to the level of an iPhone launch. Still, Apple is entering a market where the high bar of success for any individual manufacturer thus far has been Pebble, which shipped 1 million devices between its launch in 2013 and the beginning of this year. That means Apple is almost guaranteed to obliterate any previous wearable records, leaving how far beyond the competition it can truly go as the only remaining question. Apple declined to comment on rumor or speculation.
Source: http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/17/initial-apple-watch-orders-pegged-at-between-5-and-6-million/
Mistakes include ordering too much power, not shutting down in off hours
The benefits of shifting business applications to Web-friendly cloud services is proving far more complex than lining up a partner and flipping a switch, say executives who have made the transition. Absent proper expense controls, they say the cloud can be exceptionally wasteful of expensive resources.
What to watch for? Experts say always keep future costs in mind when planning the shift. Some common mistakes include ordering too much computing power, failing to program software shutdowns in off hours, not using monitoring tools to keep tabs on wasted computing cycles, or allowing programmers to believe cycles are free.
Lessons learned from cloud-pioneers such as streaming video provider Netflix Inc. and life-sciences equipment and services firm Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., can be helpful for information-technology executives.
Adrian Cockcroft, a former Netflix cloud architect who oversaw the company’s move to Amazon.com Inc.’s Web services business from its data center, says Netflix engineers wrote software that automatically shut down systems at off-peak times and could predict when to resume activity. Another Netflix custom program tracked the cloud computing resources consumed by each region or service.
“If you build applications that assume the machines are ephemeral and can be replaced in a few minutes or even seconds, then you end up building an application that is cost-aware,” said Mr. Cockcroft, now a technology fellow at venture-capital firm Battery Ventures. “The big thing in enterprise computing now, and it goes right up to the CIO level, is optimizing for speed and agility,” he said.
The economic case for embracing cloud computing is based on the idea that consuming resources as you need them beats expending capital and maintenance budgets to fund a roomful of servers. But the ease with which departments can tap online resources with little more than a company credit card can lead to problems. Ordering too much computing power can be as easy as over ordering at a restaurant or leaving the water running at home.
Some 60% of cloud software servers can be reduced or terminated because companies have purchased too many, estimates Boris Goldberg, co-founder and chief technology officer at Cloudyn Ltd., which develops software to monitor and manage cloud computing.
Mark Field, vice president of information technology at Thermo Fisher remembers the day he discovered that the pay-what-you-use argument for cloud computing had a flip-side. The Waltham, Mass., life sciences company had rented computing power from Amazon Web Services to perform minor computing tasks. But on Fridays the engineers would leave computing tasks processing through the weekend, running up the bill with AWS and erasing potential cost savings. “Would you like someone leaving the shower running in your house all weekend long?” Mr. Field asked.
To stanch the leak, Mr. Field ordered that all procurement of cloud services go through his department. Each week he combs through the bills for cloud services and finds underutilized servers, or servers that are running when no one is using them.
Like Netflix, Thermo Fisher developed software scripts that can start or stop entire computing systems on demand. He also elected to swap more expensive AWS machines—AWS sells virtual servers that accommodate various computing workloads—for lower cost AWS services because he determined the servers he was using were more powerful than what was needed. In December, Thermo Fisher cut $20,000 from its previous AWS bill.
The ability to manage cloud costs is becoming a priority for businesses as the technology moves deeper into the mainstream. World-wide spending on public cloud services is expected to total $59.5 billion, up from $45.7 billion in 2013, according market research firm IDC. The cloud market is expected to have a compound annual growth rate of 23% through 2017.
Gautam Roy, vice president of infrastructure and IT operations at Waste Management Inc., has “battle scars” from his early efforts to make use of the cloud. While managing IT infrastructure and systems software for the Chicago Board Options Exchange in 2009, cloud costs exceeded his planned spending by 35% because engineers left computing tasks running when they weren’t at work.
Mr. Roy also has quibbled with vendors who wouldn’t accommodate several guarantees he sought regarding data uptime, separation of the trading firm’s data from those of other customers, and constant data encryption.
At Waste Management, Mr. Roy currently relies heavily on server and desktop virtualization technologies. The company uses some cloud services, such asSalesforce.com Inc., for sales management. But Mr. Roy said he may adopt more public cloud solutions because the market has matured much since his time at CBOE.
Jamie Cutler, CIO of Denver oil-and-gas explorer QEP Resources Inc., recommends negotiating or planning for software customization requirements as part of a cloud migration strategy. In one case, he sought customized functionality from a vendor who wasn’t able to provide it on his schedule. As a result, QEP is paying the cloud vendor and an on-premises vendor for the functionality it required.
Mr. Cutler said it was a crucial lesson he is now applying while reviewing cloud disaster recovery and storage services. In the future, he said, “We’re going to be more careful about what we put in the cloud.”
Source: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hidden-waste-and-expense-of-cloud-computing-1424139032
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Are you having problems with the home internet speed and with surprisingly high internet bills?
Maybe your router is one of the 120,000 used by Australians that is vulnerable to a new type of scam being leveraged by criminals who use them to launch cyber attacks.
The IT security firm Nominum discovered that as many as 24 million routers around the world are affected by a simple configuration issue that hackers can leverage.
The results of these hackers’ attacks are slowed internet speed and potential rise in the internet bills. The reason is that, through various techniques, small DNS query are turned into a much larger payload directed at the target network. The attacker composes a DNS request message of approximately 60 bytes to trigger delivery of a response message of approximately 4000 bytes to the target. The resulting amplification factor, approximately 70:1, significantly increases the volume of traffic the target receives, accelerating the rate at which the target's resources will be depleted. This is what is known as a distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) system amplification attack.
Bruce Van Nice, a director at Nominum says “"People may see that their internet service starts to slow down either because their access connection is congested with traffic or because their home gateway is busy proxying these queries and forwarding huge answers back to a target. But they have no idea that their home router is potentially being bombarded with [these] queries.''
DNS amplification is one of the more popular attack types. It's hard to defend against DDoS attacks. There are actually two separate issues: keeping your network from being attacked by others and hardening your machines so they can't be compromised and used in attacks.
The first step is to protect your own network against being attacked. This is hard to do, since any network is vulnerable to being overloaded by seemingly-legitimate traffic. Turning on ingress filtering will help screen out junk packets. In addition, there are a number of settings that you can adjust to harden it against common attacks. Here's what to do:
- Go to Microsoft's security bulletin site. Download all the pertinent patches that you don't already have installed.
- Configure your firewall to block traffic on any port you don't actually need.
- Review the TCP/IP hardening settings described in " Security Considerations for Network Attacks ". Apply them to any server which is exposed directly to the Internet.
Unfortunately, protecting your machines against attacks can be difficult because attackers keep changing their modus operandi. It's simpler to prevent your computers from becoming zombies and contributing to the DDoS problem.
For more information on how to protect your machine visit our website or contact us.
Google announced in these days its new domain service. The service, which is not active yet, will allows you to buy and manage domain names. Google Domains, this is the name of the service, also helps you build your site, set up email addresses, and manage hosting. In other words will be possible to run and entire website without ever leaving the Google ecosystem.
The service will partner with several website building partners including Shopify, Weebly, Squarespace and Wix. With the Domain service, we will get 100 branded email addresses and up to 100 custom subdomains. Visitors will be also routed through Google’s own DNS system, so they can expect a fast, dependable connection.
The price is not yet quoted, although a window on the Google Domains site suggests that registering a domain will cost $12 a year.
The decision represent a competition move against the ex partner GoDaddy, the world’s largest domain name registrar.
For using this latest Google service we will have to wait, although a beta version is available at this link.
For more information visit our website design page or contact us.
Microsoft Windows 8 has no setting to enable or disable the start button as is very committed to force people to use the new start screen. Undoubtedly the start screen does offer several benefits, however a large number of users still prefer the dear old start menu as easiest and quickest way to launch any application. And Microsoft seems to have finally realized that many other users do as well. At its Build conference in April, the software giant revealed that it will bring back a new and hopefully improved Start menu in the next update to Windows.
Meanwhile there are a few things that can be done to get back the windows start button. Try one or all of the below suggestions to see what works best for you
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An easy and quick alternative for these users looking for things such as the Command prompt, Computer management, Device Manager, Event Viewer, Control Panel, Windows Explorer, etc. try using the shortcut key ( Windows key + X )
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Crate a Windows Start Menu Toolbar. It is possible to create a start menu into a toolbar, which allows you to access all the programs you normally see in All Programs. Simply:
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Enable “show hidden files”: Here's how to display hidden files and folders.
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Open Folder Options by clicking the Start button
, clicking Control Panel, clicking Appearance and Personalization, and then clicking Folder Options. -
Click the View tab.
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Under Advanced settings, click Show hidden files, folders, and drives, and then click OK.
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2. Right-click on the Taskbar and click toolbars and then New Toolbars.
3.Browse to C:\Program Data\Microsoft\Windows and select Start Menu. Then Choose Select Fold
Now you’ll have a new start menu folder with all your programs.
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Finally there are few different tools that can be installed to mimic the start button. In my opinion the best two options are:
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Start Menu 8. Start Menu 8 emulates the classic Windows 7 start menu, both in style and function. Pressing the windows key will open the menu and display a list of folder shortcuts on the right, a search bar on the bottom, and a list of program folders for easy access to all your applications. For the most part, Start Menu 8 looks, acts, and tastes like the old Start button, but also comes with a few tweaks and enhancements.
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2.Classic Shell - Another great free and open source software tool to add the start menu and other previous Windows features to Windows 8. The Classic Shell menu displays shortcuts to all of your programs, documents, and settings.
For more information and for assistance please contact us or visit our services page.
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