As PCs decline, it’s Apple that’s making real money from PCs
Apple doesn't even make the list of top five sellers of PCs in the world (though it is No. 5 in the United States), but some number crunching by Asymco's Horace Dediu shows a surprising fact: Apple earns 45 percent of the operating profits in the PC industry. The top five sellers -- Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Lenovo, Asus, and Acer -- together make only 33 percent of operating profit. (Operating profit is the cash the companies keep after all expenses, including day-to-day operational costs, are paid for.) Read more...
Adobe confirms Windows 8 users vulnerable to active Flash exploits
Microsoft's Windows 8 is vulnerable to attack by exploits that hackers have been aiming at PCs for several weeks, Adobe has confirmed.
Microsoft said it will not patch the bug in Flash Player until what it called "GA," for "general availability." That would be Oct. 26, when Windows 8 hits retail and PCs powered by the new operating system go on sale.
"We will update Flash in Windows 8 via Windows Update as needed," a spokeswoman said in a reply to questions. "The current version of Flash in the Windows 8 RTM build does not have the latest fix, but we will have a security update coming through Windows Update in the GA timeframe." Read more...
Microsoft remains mum on Windows 8 upgrades from Vista, XP
Microsoft today declined to confirm whether users of Windows XP and Vista will be able to upgrade their PCs to Windows 8 when the latter launches later this year.
On Monday, Microsoft spelled out the editions it would offer customers working with 32- and 64-bit Intel and AMD processor-powered PCs and tablets.
In that blog post, the company also noted the upgrade paths to Windows 8 for existing machines, saying that people now running Windows 7 Starter, Home Basic or Home Premium could upgrade to the consumer-oriented Windows 8. Systems running Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate will be upgradable to Windows 8 Pro. Read more...
Windows 8 hardware rules ‘derail user-friendly Linux’
The question of whether Secure Boot technology in UEFI firmware could exclude Linux from PCs running Windows 8 has taken a fresh twist.
Red Hat engineer Matthew Garrett, one of the first to flag up the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface issue, has blogged that Microsoft's rules for certified Windows 8 hardware do not make it easier to boot Linux despite what some have claimed.
Redmond's requirements mention the existence of a boot option for PCs that can fire up a digitally signed Linux kernel. This custom boot-mode would allow the user to modify the contents of the machine's Secure Boot signature database and the platform key (PK) that verifies kernels during system start-up. Read more...
MS denies secure boot will exclude Linux
Microsoft has hit back at concerns that secure boot technology in UEFI firmware could lock out Linux from Windows 8 PCs, saying that consumers will be free to run whatever they want on their PCs.
Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) specifications, designed to reduce start-up times and improve security, allow computers to verify digitally signed OS loaders before booting. The feature in UEFI, the successor to BIOS ROM, is designed as a countermeasure against rootkits and other bootloader nasties.
However computer scientists, including Professor Ross Anderson of Cambridge University, warned earlier this week that the approach would make it impossible to run "unauthorised" OSes such as Linux and FreeBSD on PCs. A signed build of Linux would work, but that would mean persuading OEMs to include the keys. Read more...