Über Dinge, auf die es im (Arbeits-) Leben ankommt, erfährt man in Schule und an Universitäten wenig. In ihrem Handbuch "Mein erster richtiger Job" bereitet Alexandra Levit Hochschulabgänger gut darauf vor, eine neue Welt zu betreten. …mehr
Die populäre Linux-Distribution Ubuntu bringt in der Version 11.04 eine Reihe von Verbesserungen, darunter die Desktop-Umgebung Unity. …mehr
The Hong Kong stock exchange has been forced to resort to using emails and newspaper adverts in order to communicate with investors after two days of sustained DDoS attacks against its news disclosure website. …mehr
Months after Google said that Chinese hackers were targeting the Gmail accounts of senior U.S. government officials, attempts to hijack Gmail inboxes continue, a researcher said Thursday. …mehr
Hear that sound? That’s the sound of autumn’s unceasing approach. If you spent much of the past week enjoying summery weather before fall’s inevitable arrival, we can’t say we blame you. And we won’t hold a grudge if you missed a slew of important and exciting stories because of it. Instead, we’ll fill you in on all the good articles that you missed. …mehr
Shares in Micro Focus jumped yesterday after the British software company said talks with private equity investors could move it closer to being acquired. …mehr
Free speech advocates are crying foul over the San Francisco subway’s decision to shut off cell phone service in its downtown stations to prevent a protest. …mehr
Apple threatened to drop Intel as a component supplier unless it produced chips with drastically lower power consumption, it has been reported. …mehr
Those of you relying on the kindness of strangers, or more precisely: , might want to bring an alternative payment method while getting your next caffeine kick. …mehr
Google has started integrating Google+ users’ public posts into the search engine’s social search results, one-upping Facebook by wielding its search strengths to boost its fledgling social network’s features. …mehr
Many things may be surprising this week, dear readers. For example, you may be surprised to know that Rob Enderle was wrong about something! You would, however, have to have absolutely no idea who Rob Enderle is. But it’s possible! More surprising might be the Macalope’s take on the patent wars: He’s not, exactly, for Apple! Finally, it’s Apple’s turn to be surprised about a startling new technology known as “web apps.” Who saw that coming?! …mehr
Apple will announce a new line-up of iPods on Wednesday 7 September, a Japanese report claims. …mehr
MSI's latest gaming notebook, the MSI GT683R, will catch your eye with its flashy LEDs, but it'll keep you interested with its speedy performance. This gaming powerhouse is one of the first laptops to ship with Nvidia's GeForce GTX 560M graphics card, and it features all sorts of boosts such as MSI's Turbo Drive Engine technology (for overclocking) and Cooler Boost technology (for controlling the fans with a single touch). …mehr
Dublin-born illustrator recently created a striking set of illustrations for an article in Wallpaper* about Indian weddings. The piece detailed how traditional ostentatious weddings are falling out of favour, with couples preferring smaller, simpler and stylish ceremonies, and Eoin was asked to represent the contrast between the two approaches to matrimonial celebrations. …mehr
The biggest challenges for all growers--commercial or recreational--is keeping track of the variables of the season and making decisions based on past performance. MyGardenBytes is a database that allows you to track seeds, clones, plants, and fertilizer use, in general and through daily journals, and across multiple locations. …mehr
Between my Android tablet and my Android phone, I've been creating a lot more content on the go than I may ever have expected to. Between pictures and notes captured on my Thunderbolt, and the occasional article hammered out on my Iconia, There's pretty much always something on my mobile devices that I'd like to grab from my PC. handles this task beautifully. …mehr
Is Apple concocting an iPhone & iCloud sandwich? Rumors say “delicious.” Meanwhile, Apple Stores across the UK are clearing out their show floors as a precaution, and Nintendo’s investors are asking the company why it can’t be more friendly with that nice Apple boy down the street. The remainders for Thursday, August 11, 2011, are all over the place. …mehr
The National Policing Improvement Agency's (NPIA) new "Amazon-style" online procurement hub, which enables police forces to buy specified goods and services online, has gone live today (Friday). …mehr
Around 750 government IT workers employed by Fujitsu - many at HMRC and the DVLA - have been balloted for a strike action over "insufficient" pay rises. …mehr
Nigel Cameron has a question. …mehr
Samsung is ready to bring its flagship Android-based in the U.S. -- a popular offering for consumers -- and beat Apple to the launch of the . …mehr
Surrey County Council is looking for a supplier to provide a wide-area network (WAN) and managed IP services for public sector organisations in the region. …mehr
The PC world is buzzing lately about how laptop manufacturers are struggling to compete with Apple’s MacBook Air, which has exploded in popularity since the introduction of the third-gen model in 2010. This year’s fourth-gen update is proving to be the must-have laptop of the year. For every laptop manufacturer not named “Apple”, the race is on to make new super-thin and super-light laptops. Intel calls them Ultrabooks, and the name is catching on, despite being sort of silly.Here’s a question for you: why didn’t HP, Dell, Acer, Samsung, or some other huge PC manufacturer build the Air before Apple? The answer is: they did. Sony’s was a razor-thin laptop weighing less than 2 pounds, and it came out in 2003! More recently, Dell introduced the in 2009, and later that year the even thinner . These laptops didn’t sell. Sony’s cost over three grand. Dell’s were also too expensive, and the battery life was pitiful. Instead of fixing those problems, Dell . Sony and Dell built nearly-great products with critical flaws and instead of challenging their engineers and designers to find ways to address those flaws, they concluded that nobody really wanted these systems. Apple didn’t give up, though. Drive too thick and too slow? Apple commissioned a special case-less SSD that could fit in its slim design. It worked to make the motherboard smaller, the components cheaper, and crammed as much lithium polymer battery as it could fit in the case. By 2010, the Air had evolved from an overpriced, underpowered status toy to the must-have computer of our day.My point here is not simply that PC manufacturers are quitters. It’s that they have the entirely wrong mindset to build must-have products. Several times a year, I have meetings with major PC manufacturers about their upcoming product lines, and the tenor is always the same: “Our customers told us this is what they want, and our market research says this is what people are buying, so we made this great product to address that market!” There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but you’ll never set any trends that way. If you want to make the product that everyone else compares their product to, you have to go outside the envelope. You have to take a risk to build something nobody has told you they want, because they don’t know they want it yet, and then you have to invest in it and stick with it until you get it right. The real irony here is that their marketing departments are constantly striving to find differentiators: ways to set their products apart from the pack. If every company is building products to address the same set of market research data, you’re not going to get differentiated products.Building a better Air - or even just a cheaper one - is proving to be difficult. Those unibody aluminum chassis on MacBooks make them really rigid despite the thin design, and Apple has capable of carving a laptop body out of a single block of metal. Challengers like the have metal bodies, but without the satisfying stiff feel and seamless edges of one carved from a single chuck of alloy. Of course, the Series 9 is also quite expensive. When one of the main reasons people don’t buy a Mac these days is because they can’t buy one for less than $1,000, pricing your Mac alternative well above that price doesn’t do you any favors.There are other pretenders to the ultrabook throne coming this fall. There’s the Asus UX51, and the . Rumor has it an ultrabook soon. What do all these systems have in common? They’re too late. Yes, the ultra-thin form factor made popular by the Air is rising in popularity, and if priced right some of these systems will sell pretty well. Sales numbers notwithstanding, they’ll suffer the ignominious fate of being labeled also-rans. They’ll be “MacBook Air-like.” The problem with PC manufacturers is not that they can’t build a computer as good as the hottest Apple thing, it’s that they’re constantly trying to. Apple is in the driver’s seat.If you aim at a fast-moving target, you’re sure to hit behind it. While HP, Acer, Asus, and others are worrying about how to make a MacBook Air killer, Apple is busy redefining the rest of its laptop line. Intel is to drive the ultrabook category with new inventions and new, will help drive costs down. By the time all the PC manufacturers figure out how to make a cheaper laptop that is as thin, light, and long-lived as a MacBook Air, everyone will be drooling over the new MacBook Apple will have just introduced. I suppose we can’t expect a lot of creativity and focus from companies that think a random string of letters and numbers make for appropriate product names.Here’s a bit of free advice for the PC manufacturers: lose the optical drive. No, not just in your upcoming ultrabooks, in everything. I’ve asked four PC makers this year why they’re still putting DVD drives in their 13-to-15 inch laptops while struggling to make them thinner and lighter. They all said the same thing: “our customers say they aren’t ready for that yet.” Well of course they’re not! If you wait until the world tells you an optical drive isn’t worth the tradeoff in thickness, weight, and space for a bigger battery, you’ll be marketing laptops just like everyone else’s. I’d make a million dollar bet Apple’s next generation of MacBook Pro won’t have optical drives in its 13 and 15 inch models, and they’ll be so slim and sleek and light everyone will want one. Then Dell, HP, Acer, Asus, Samsung, Sony, and the others will follow suit six months later, looking like they can’t come up with an idea until after Apple does.Here’s another free idea: make netbooks half as thick as they are today. Intel has advanced the Atom platform over the years, AMD has that tiny Fusion E-series chip, there’s no optical drive, and the rest of the internals are minimal at best. Yet netbooks still basically look like they did four years ago when the genre was new. There’s no good reason a system that small, that cheap, with that little horsepower, should be more than two-thirds of an inch thick.Consider the story of Hewlett-Packard’s invention of the first pocket calculator, the , back in 1972. HP’s market research said they shouldn’t make and release it - it was going to cost at least $350. At twenty times the cost of a slide rule, nobody was going to buy it! Bill Hewlett said, “I don’t care, I want one of these things” and pushed the project through. It was so revolutionary, so visionary and transformative, that even at a cost of $350+ (that’s 1972 dollars!) the orders were over 10,000 a month. HP didn’t project sales of 10,000 a year. I don’t know if HP or other laptop manufacturers still feel as though they operate with this sort of audacious drive to build gotta-have-it products, and “damn the torpedoes,” but it’s certainly not evident in the products we see on the market today. Follow Jason Cross on , , or . …mehr
Still hanging on to a DS Lite, or DSi XL? Today may be your best chance to turn that last generation Nintendo handheld into a decent amount of cash to trade up for a shiny, new …mehr
CSC has insisted its work on the £11.7 billion Department of Health National Programme for IT (NPfIT) is going "very well", two weeks after ministers were advised by a powerful committee to . …mehr
The availability of Google cache servers has encouraged more African Internet and content providers to exchange content locally, according to experts at last week's Africa Peering and Interconnection Forum in Accra, Ghana. …mehr
Telkom South Africa's pan-African data provider, iWay Africa, has completed the integration of AFSAT Communications Uganda and Africa Online Uganda in a move to form one of the continent's largest communications technology companies. …mehr
There are many reasons to love Google, and 170 million Pakistanis just got one more -- the Google Doodle for , the day Pakistan was founded, has been sighted on the . …mehr
You can find QR codes practically anywhere these days. Short for "Quick Response," they're the little black-and-white pixilated squares that are commonly found in print ads and business cards, on products, displayed on television, and even stitched into fabric. If a person's phone has a camera and the right kind of reader app, he can scan the QR code to display text, contact information, connect to a wireless network, or open a Web page. …mehr
Self-publishing service Blurb is now letting you create notebooks featuring a mix of your own artwork and photos, and a range of blank pages for your own jottings and sketches. …mehr
While there was no reason for the , as of today, PopCap is officially a part of EA. confirmed that the deal closed for the expected $750 million dollars. …mehr
Those of you relying on the kindness of strangers, or more precisely: , might want to bring an alternative payment method while getting your next caffeine kick. …mehr
Soho Beach House is the latest private member's club, hotel and spa from the group behind Soho House and Shoreditch House, eschewing rain-flecked London for the glossy sunshine of Miami. For its launch, BBH commissioned Swedish illustrator Jonas Bergstrand to create a series of three posters that evoke the sophistication of the Cte d'Azur in the first half of the 20th Century and the feeling of simple luxury that the club aspires to. …mehr
