Surveys show Apple most admired, most satisfying company
Apple, riding continued high demand for its Mac computers and iPad tablets, has topped rivals in two new surveys of customer satisfaction.
Apple’s customer satisfaction ranking rose a point from 86 to 87 (on a scale of 100) to top the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which focused on PC makers. This is the eighth straight year Apple has taken the crown, topping its own record score from last year.
"In the eight years that Apple has led the PC industry in customer satisfaction, its stock price has increased by 2,300 percent," said Claes Fornell, founder of the ACSI and author of The Satisfied Customer: Winners and Losers in the Battle for Buyer Preference, in a statement. "Apple’s winning combination of innovation and product diversification—including spinning off technologies into entirely new directions—has kept the company consistently at the leading edge." Read more...
Digital Dilemmas: Help! Constant connectivity is making it impossible to think
Ding! You've got mail. Bing! You've got SMS. Ping! IM incoming. Chirrup! Look there's a tweet with your @name on it. Brrring! Quick, your mobile's ringing. Meep! Someone just tagged you in 100 photos on Facebook. Oh hai! LinkedIn in your inbox again - wanting to hook you up with everyone you've ever emailed.
All this means it's definitely time for a screen break. But hang on, what's that vibrating in your pocket? Hello unread BlackBerry email. Better check what it is - if only to extinguish the flashing LED. But argh! The evil red eye just won't stop winking at me!
Ping! Ding! Bing! Brrrrrrrrrring!
Learn how to silence the digital distractions - before they silence you...Image: Shutterstock
I can't get no sleep...
The digital world never sleeps, and as a result nor, it would seem, can we, the digital workforce. We're assailed on every side by a barrage of connected gadgets and services all demanding micropayment in bits and bytes of our attention.
And it's taking its toll. We're afflicted with digital tinnitus - and it's making it impossible to think. Read more...
Microsoft milks Casio for using Linux
In the latest news from the tech world's ongoing global hunt to find someone to sue over/deal with on patents, Microsoft has signed a licensing agreement with Casio.
The "broad, multiyear" contract, which neither party will put a price to, will help protect Casio devices that use Linux. While Linux is supposed to be open source, Microsoft has claimed since 2007 that more than 235 of its patents are violated by the project.
In the last four years, the software giant has been quietly threatening legal action for any Linux-using company that refuses to sign patent deals with it. Amazon, Novell, Linspire, TurboLinux and Xandros have all put their X on the dotted line. Others, like satnav maker TomTom, ended up in court, but eventually settled. Read more...
Update: Google Wallet gets official launch
Google officially launched its Google Wallet application late Monday for NFC-ready Sprint Nexus S 4G phone users.
The application launches initially for Citi MasterCard credit card holders, but Google also said Monday that Visa, Discover and American Express will be able to add their cards to future versions of Google Wallet.
The application, first announced in May, was described in a Google blog on Monday.
Google said it would begin rolling out Google Wallet to Nexus S customers through an over-the-air update; customers need to look for the "Wallet" app on the phone.
A two-minute video demo of the app is included. Read more...
First look: Photoshop Elements 10
Adobe today released the latest iteration of its consumer photo and video software, version 10 of Photoshop Elements (pictures) and Premiere Elements (movies).
Perhaps the most interesting addition to Elements photo editing is a "guided edit" for changing an image's depth of field by blurring the background. This isn't completely new capability -- you could do this in earlier versions of Elements by selecting the background manually and applying a blur filter. However, the guided edit cuts down the steps and makes it easier for those who are less comfortable diving deep into Elements' many tools.
I'm not sure this feature is quite as compelling as some other recent updates to the Elements editor, such as the addition of layer masks (for a long time only available in full Photoshop) and "content-aware" smart retouching. However, it took me less than half a minute to do a simple background blur on a flower photo with the new guided edit -- a feature that could appeal to users who want to punch up a portrait or still life without spending a lot of time.
New depth of field guided edit in Elements 10
Image after background blur is applied
There are also some intriguing new features in Elements' organizer and the Premiere video editing package this time around. Read more...
Hackers hit Japan’s biggest defense contractor
Japan's largest defense contractor, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, today acknowledged that scores of its servers and PCs had been infected with malware, but denied that any confidential information had been stolen.
The Daily Yomiuri, citing confidential sources, first reported the attack, which involved as many as eight different types of malware, including Trojan horses.
A U.S.-based Mitsubishi spokesman confirmed that the company had uncovered a large-scale intrusion that had planted malware on 45 servers and an additional 38 individual PCs in several locations around Japan. Read more...
OS X Lion bugs let hackers view, change local user passwords
The latest version of OS X Lion allows any user to easily change the password of any local account, due to permissions oversights on Apple's part. The news comes less than a month after another Lion vulnerability that let users bypass LDAP without a password gained notoriety.
Originally reported by Defence in Depth blogger Patrick Dunstan, the root of the newly discovered problem in Mac OS X 10.7 is tied to the user-specific shadow files used in modern OS X platforms. These files are essentially hash databases and contain, among other things, the user's encrypted passwords. Ideally, they should be accessible only via high-privilege accounts. Read more...
How cloud computing is changing data center design and cost
If you've read this blog for a while, it's no secret that I believe that one aspect of cloud computing is a dramatic drop in the cost of computing. While many discuss cloud computing's cost advantage in terms of better utilization via resource pooling and rapid elasticity, we believe that there is a more fundamental shift going on as data centers are redesigned to focus on scale, efficiency, and a shift to commodity components.
Put another way, the former cost advantage (utilization, etc.) relies on more efficient use of existing data center design patterns, while the latter relies on transforming the cost basis of data centers by creating new design patterns.
I wrote about this topic a few months ago in a post entitled "Are you making your data centers cloud-friendly?" In it I discussed trends evinced at the San Francisco DatacenterDynamics conference: energy efficiency, raised operating temperatures, and "chicken coop" data center building designs. Read more...
Data center systems run in exposed shed to prove reliability point
In an experiment that began in January, servers, networking gear, and storage systems have been running in an simple shed without failure.
This experiment is giving David Filas, a data center engineer at the healthcare provider Trinity Health, the ammunition he needs to argue that IT equipment is a lot tougher than most think.
Through winter, spring, and summer, these decommissioned systems keep running despite big variations in temperate and humidity. And the uptime of the systems has been better than what Google and Amazon have delivered so far this year.
Filas wants to convince IT administrators at his company, which runs 47 hospitals and other health care facilities, that it's OK to raise the temperature in data centers. But the IT staff has been reluctant to do so, he says. Read more...
Will Windows 8 run x86 apps on ARM tablets — or not?
The Web today is abuzz with all sorts of conflicting stories about running "legacy" Windows 7 apps on the ARM Windows 8 desktop. Microsoft hasn't given a simple yes-or-no answer to this vexing question, but I thought Galen Gruman nailed it several days ago, in his post Windows 8 on ARM chips: It was too good to be true. He says that ARM-based Windows 8 machines won't run X86 apps, referencing Steve Sinofsky's response during the earnings call last Wednesday.
Here's what Sinofsky said: "We've been very clear since the very first CES demos and forward that the ARM product won't run any X86 applications. We've done a bunch of work to enable that -- enable a great experience there, particularly around devices and device drivers... [W]hat we announced yesterday for the first time was that when you write a Metro style application, all the tools are there to enable you in any of the languages that we support to automatically support ARM or X86. I think that's the key part of everything that we'll run." Read more...