I've spent a week using the Apple iPhone 5s as my primary device. In
general, it is a solid effort on Apple's part, but it is not without its faults.
Here are some of the strong points and weak points I've observed over the last
seven days.
iOS 7 is a bit buggy on the 5s. I've installed iOS 7 on an iPhone 5, an
iPad 3, and an iPad Mini. It runs best on the iPhone 5 and iPad Mini. On the
iPhone 5s, iOS 7 is prone to app crashes. Third-party app crashes aren't too
awful, but when native apps such as the Settings Menu and Safari crash, you know
something's not right.
The hardware is fine, if unexciting. The 5s is a solid little device. Apple
designed it with care and everything about it exudes quality and class. The
display is great, even if it is smaller than I'd like, and the small form factor
makes it easy to carry around and use.
t's not the best voice phone. I've been testing an AT&T model of the
iPhone 5s and am not impressed with its phone calls. I heard lots of
interference and the earpiece speaker doesn't get quite loud enough. The
speakerphone produces plenty of volume, but it also amplifies the interference.
The iPhone is a better voice phone.
The battery hasn't given me any trouble. The first few days were a bit
iffy, but that's true of most smartphones. Once the battery cycled through a few
charges, it settled into a good rhythm. I routinely got a full day out of it,
despite heavy use. It's worth noting, though, that the battery cannot be removed
or replaced, so you're stuck with what's sealed in the iPhone 5s.
The camera is great. The new software, combined with the improved sensor,
go a long way toward making the iPhone 5s one of the best camera phones
available. The camera app is simpler to use and includes more features, such as
burst mode and slow-motion video capture, and the results are on par with
today's best devices. The improved gallery app is far more powerful when it
comes to organizing photos, and some of the editing tools are a welcome
addition.
iOS 7 is still inflexible. Apple's simple smartphone/tablet user interface
may win usability awards, but it is nowhere near as flexible or customizable as
Android or even Windows Phone. The inability to control exactly where apps are
positioned is frustrating, and the lack of resizable home screen widgets and
apps leaves the OS looking too homogenous. I'd love to see some truly dynamic
content on the home screen.
Control Center is convenient. Apple's new dashboard for controlling some of
the iPhone 5s's features is a big help. It makes simple tasks such as turning on
and off the Wi-Fi or Bluetooth radios a breeze. I also like the fact that it
includes controls for the music player as well as apps like the flashlight,
calculator, timer, and camera. This is definitely a time saver, considering that
it took several steps to reach many of these controls in previous versions of
iOS.
There's plenty to like about the 5s, but at the end of the day it offers
only a slightly different experience than last year's iPhone 5. The Touch ID
fingerprint sensor is the biggest difference. The camera and processor
improvements in the 5s, though very real, aren't all that much better than the
iPhone 5. We can only hope that Apple will make significant changes in next
year's iPhone 6.
Saturday, 28 September 2013
UI and UX paradigms as well as a big variety of hardware targets
In an work to save each of its ailing platforms, Microsoft is arranging to
combine each the Windows eight and Windows Telephone eight app retailers into a
single, all-encompassing app shop. It isn’t entirely clear regardless of whether
this can result in total cross-platform compatibility for each Windows eight and
WP8 apps - like Apple’s iPhone and iPad App Store - or if it’s far more a case
of designing a genuinely kick-ass app retailer that both platforms will then use
independently of one another. In either case, the new combined app store will
seek to rectify two enormous complaints: That Windows eight and Windows
Telephone eight have poor app ecosystems, and, specifically inside the case of
Windows eight, the utterly atrocious app store practical experience that
generally leaves you asking yourself why on earth you decided to get a Windows
tablet rather than an iPad.
This news comes from the usual “sources acquainted with the company’s plans,” who spoke for the Verge. In line with the source, the head of Microsoft’s newly formed Operating Systems group, Terry Myerson, held a meeting exactly where he told a huge number of Microsoft personnel concerning the new strategy to combine the app shops. There didn’t seem to become substantially inside the way of facts, only that the new store - which we’ll bet excellent funds on it being called One particular Store - would include the “next release” of Windows and Windows Telephone. This need to imply Windows Phone eight.1 and an update for Windows eight.1, each of that are due in spring 2014.
As for how the One Shop will truly work, we can only guess. In a perfect world, it would perform like the iOS App Shop: apps developed for Windows Phone 8 will be scaled up for use on Windows 8 tablets, and apps especially designed for tablet interfaces would show up if you’re browsing the shop on your Windows 8 tablet. Apple can get away with this because its smartphones and tablets run the identical operating technique, and therefore developers can target the precise very same APIs. Windows eight and Windows Telephone eight share a great deal of comparable characteristics, and in some cases some low-level code, but it is nowhere close to the same level of similarity as an iPhone and iPad.
Microsoft, for its component, has previously taken towards the stage and promised a unified ecosystem - but the specifics on how such unification may well really take place haven’t been forthcoming. As it stands, when you develop a Metro app very carefully, porting it to Windows Phone 8 can be as easy as altering a handful of lines of code. In reality, although, as a result of wildly various screen sizes, UI and UX paradigms, and a massive variety of hardware targets (from Tegra 3 and integrated GPUs, by way of to Haswell and discrete GPUs), cross-platform compatibility has remained elusive.
Unless Microsoft features a magic trick up its sleeve to enable developers to simply develop apps that run on both platforms - a compatibility layer (emulator) of some type, probably - then it’s a lot more most likely that the 1 Shop will just be a new app retailer design and style that is certainly utilized by both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. Windows eight sorely requirements a brand new app store, and if a really unified app ecosystem is coming for Windows 9 and Windows Telephone 9, then it wouldn’t hurt to have people today made use of to the new app store nowadays. (Study: The Windows eight Store is broken: Here’s ways to fix it.)
One more possibility, as I’ve hinted at ahead of, is the fact that 1 of Microsoft’s OSes might basically consume the other. As not too long ago as last week, Microsoft’s Myerson told some analysts that we should really anticipate to determine Windows RT on larger phones - and it goes the other way, also, together with the Lumia 1520 phablet operating Windows Telephone. I'd not be shocked if Windows/RT ultimately consumes Windows Phone, which would extremely neatly solve the challenge of cross-platform compatibility by removing the pesky “cross” bit.
http://www.windows7retailpack.com/adobe-photoshop-extended-cs5-retail-pack-p-3611.html
This news comes from the usual “sources acquainted with the company’s plans,” who spoke for the Verge. In line with the source, the head of Microsoft’s newly formed Operating Systems group, Terry Myerson, held a meeting exactly where he told a huge number of Microsoft personnel concerning the new strategy to combine the app shops. There didn’t seem to become substantially inside the way of facts, only that the new store - which we’ll bet excellent funds on it being called One particular Store - would include the “next release” of Windows and Windows Telephone. This need to imply Windows Phone eight.1 and an update for Windows eight.1, each of that are due in spring 2014.
As for how the One Shop will truly work, we can only guess. In a perfect world, it would perform like the iOS App Shop: apps developed for Windows Phone 8 will be scaled up for use on Windows 8 tablets, and apps especially designed for tablet interfaces would show up if you’re browsing the shop on your Windows 8 tablet. Apple can get away with this because its smartphones and tablets run the identical operating technique, and therefore developers can target the precise very same APIs. Windows eight and Windows Telephone eight share a great deal of comparable characteristics, and in some cases some low-level code, but it is nowhere close to the same level of similarity as an iPhone and iPad.
Microsoft, for its component, has previously taken towards the stage and promised a unified ecosystem - but the specifics on how such unification may well really take place haven’t been forthcoming. As it stands, when you develop a Metro app very carefully, porting it to Windows Phone 8 can be as easy as altering a handful of lines of code. In reality, although, as a result of wildly various screen sizes, UI and UX paradigms, and a massive variety of hardware targets (from Tegra 3 and integrated GPUs, by way of to Haswell and discrete GPUs), cross-platform compatibility has remained elusive.
Unless Microsoft features a magic trick up its sleeve to enable developers to simply develop apps that run on both platforms - a compatibility layer (emulator) of some type, probably - then it’s a lot more most likely that the 1 Shop will just be a new app retailer design and style that is certainly utilized by both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. Windows eight sorely requirements a brand new app store, and if a really unified app ecosystem is coming for Windows 9 and Windows Telephone 9, then it wouldn’t hurt to have people today made use of to the new app store nowadays. (Study: The Windows eight Store is broken: Here’s ways to fix it.)
One more possibility, as I’ve hinted at ahead of, is the fact that 1 of Microsoft’s OSes might basically consume the other. As not too long ago as last week, Microsoft’s Myerson told some analysts that we should really anticipate to determine Windows RT on larger phones - and it goes the other way, also, together with the Lumia 1520 phablet operating Windows Telephone. I'd not be shocked if Windows/RT ultimately consumes Windows Phone, which would extremely neatly solve the challenge of cross-platform compatibility by removing the pesky “cross” bit.
http://www.windows7retailpack.com/adobe-photoshop-extended-cs5-retail-pack-p-3611.html
Sunday, 18 August 2013
Google, Microsoft outages: Two different outlooks?
It might be something to do with a complete inability to trust my fellow
human, but I don't stick to any one provider of Web services.
I use three different browsers and three different e-mail services.
I have no adoration toward any of them, but if there's one thing that's hard not to admit, it's that most of Google's tend to work a little better than anyone else's.
Which made me wonder how last week might have proved that point.
Microsoft's Outlook e-mail has sometimes -- at least for me -- been more erratic than a Fernet-ridden fly.
Far too often, if I try to reply to a message, the system tells me it can't complete that action just at the moment.
Sometimes, I try to send a message and the software keeps spinning without conclusion.
I have to open Outlook again in a separate tab to discover that, yes, despite what the first tab was telling me, the message had been sent, but Outlook hadn't quite updated its outlook on that.
When Outlook (and SkyDrive and Contacts) went down last week, it was more than awkward.
It started with no mobile syncing and ended with no anything at all.
After hours of this, I contacted Microsoft's Service arm via Twitter. The apologies were expansive. The explanations weren't.
All I was told was: "Thanks for letting us know, Chris. Please keep checking spr.ly/6013ZhDS for service status updates."
This I did. However, even when the service status update finally said that Outlook was working normally, mine actually wasn't.
Microsoft Support suggested I keep checking the service status updates. Franz Kafka, do you read me?
"We understand your concern. We're working to resolve this as soon as possible. Check out spr.ly/6018ZhwM for updates," read the message.
Ultimately, the company explained that it was having caching problems.
Three days seemed a very long time to solve them.
For some time now, Microsoft has been telling me (and you) that Google is a quite heinous little organization.
From the Scroogled campaign to an anti-Chrome campaign, I'm supposed to think that if Google bought me a latte, it would be polluted.
Yet one thing Google can largely be trusted with it to make things that work more often than they don't. When it suffered an outage Friday, it also suggested people look at the service status board.
The outage lasted between 2 and 5 minutes, and no meaningful explanation beyond "nothing to see here" was offered.
That might reflect a certain confidence (or even arrogance) on Google's part, just as Microsoft's outage might reflect a certain confusion at its end.
It's tempting to whisper that these two outages show two companies headed in opposite directions -- though, who knows, it's summer time, so perhaps Microsoft's best engineers are sunning themselves somewhere in the Bahamas, while interns man the fort. (Googlies don't do vacations, do they?)
But there can surely be little doubt that Google buys loyalty (if not love) because its products just work, while Microsoft doesn't quite have the same reputation.
Sunday morning, I looked again at the status of my Microsoft accounts.
Everything seemed to be normal. Well, except: "A problem was recently resolved, and Calendar is now running normally."
I'll keep using my three e-mail services. I might, though, spread the load a little differently.
I use three different browsers and three different e-mail services.
I have no adoration toward any of them, but if there's one thing that's hard not to admit, it's that most of Google's tend to work a little better than anyone else's.
Which made me wonder how last week might have proved that point.
Microsoft's Outlook e-mail has sometimes -- at least for me -- been more erratic than a Fernet-ridden fly.
Far too often, if I try to reply to a message, the system tells me it can't complete that action just at the moment.
Sometimes, I try to send a message and the software keeps spinning without conclusion.
I have to open Outlook again in a separate tab to discover that, yes, despite what the first tab was telling me, the message had been sent, but Outlook hadn't quite updated its outlook on that.
When Outlook (and SkyDrive and Contacts) went down last week, it was more than awkward.
It started with no mobile syncing and ended with no anything at all.
After hours of this, I contacted Microsoft's Service arm via Twitter. The apologies were expansive. The explanations weren't.
All I was told was: "Thanks for letting us know, Chris. Please keep checking spr.ly/6013ZhDS for service status updates."
This I did. However, even when the service status update finally said that Outlook was working normally, mine actually wasn't.
Microsoft Support suggested I keep checking the service status updates. Franz Kafka, do you read me?
"We understand your concern. We're working to resolve this as soon as possible. Check out spr.ly/6018ZhwM for updates," read the message.
Ultimately, the company explained that it was having caching problems.
Three days seemed a very long time to solve them.
For some time now, Microsoft has been telling me (and you) that Google is a quite heinous little organization.
From the Scroogled campaign to an anti-Chrome campaign, I'm supposed to think that if Google bought me a latte, it would be polluted.
Yet one thing Google can largely be trusted with it to make things that work more often than they don't. When it suffered an outage Friday, it also suggested people look at the service status board.
The outage lasted between 2 and 5 minutes, and no meaningful explanation beyond "nothing to see here" was offered.
That might reflect a certain confidence (or even arrogance) on Google's part, just as Microsoft's outage might reflect a certain confusion at its end.
It's tempting to whisper that these two outages show two companies headed in opposite directions -- though, who knows, it's summer time, so perhaps Microsoft's best engineers are sunning themselves somewhere in the Bahamas, while interns man the fort. (Googlies don't do vacations, do they?)
But there can surely be little doubt that Google buys loyalty (if not love) because its products just work, while Microsoft doesn't quite have the same reputation.
Sunday morning, I looked again at the status of my Microsoft accounts.
Everything seemed to be normal. Well, except: "A problem was recently resolved, and Calendar is now running normally."
I'll keep using my three e-mail services. I might, though, spread the load a little differently.
Considering that Microsoft will never patch Windows XP again
Microsoft has reminded, cajoled, and pleaded with customers to move off of
Windows XP before support for its old OS expires next year. Now Microsoft warns
customers that they might be topic to “zero-day” threats for the rest of their
lives if they do not migrate.
“The incredibly initially month that Microsoft releases safety updates for supported versions of Windows, attackers will reverse engineer those updates, obtain the vulnerabilities, and test Windows XP to find out if it shares those vulnerabilities,” he wrote. “If it does, attackers will attempt to develop exploit code that could reap the benefits of these windows 7 home basic product key vulnerabilities on Windows XP. Due to the fact a safety update will never ever turn out to be available for Windows XP to address these vulnerabilities, Windows XP will primarily possess a ‘zero-day’ vulnerability forever.”
Zero-day vulnerabilities refer to the way in which hackers can attack an operating method or other code just before a patch is released, fixing the vulnerability. Considering that Microsoft will never patch Windows XP again following April 2014, sooner or later some vulneability that affects XP might be located.
Among July 2012 and July 2013, Windows XP was an affected item in 45 Microsoft security bulletins. Thirty of these also affected Windows 7 and Windows 8, Rains wrote.
Rains acknowledges that some protections in XP will enable mitigate attacks, and third-party antimalware application may supply some protection.
“The challenge here is that you’ll in no way know, with any confidence, in the event the trusted computing base of the program can basically be trusted because attackers are going to be armed with public know-how of zero day exploits in Windows XP that could enable them to compromise the method and possibly run the code of their decision,” Rains wrote.
That is the exact same argument that some have recently utilized, claiming that hackers will “bank” their zero-day XP attacks until soon after subsequent April, then unleash them around the unprotected herds of XP machines. As Rains notes, the sophistication of malware has only enhanced, which means that your XP machine is a lot more vulnerable, not significantly less. PCWorld’s Answer Line columnist, Lincoln Spector, agrees.
The issue that some XP users have is that they’re so in appreciate with all the way that Windows XP does things that they’re reluctant to migrate, in particular to Windows eight. Well, Windows 7 machines do exist, that offer functionality similar to XP: here’s the way to locate them.
The bottom line is this: although Microsoft stands to gain from arguing that buyers need to upgrade, the truth is: they do. So if you're nonetheless on Windows XP, begin thinking about a migration strategy.
http://www.windows7retailpack.com/microsoft-windows-7-professional-3264-bit-full-retail-pack-p-3527.html
“The incredibly initially month that Microsoft releases safety updates for supported versions of Windows, attackers will reverse engineer those updates, obtain the vulnerabilities, and test Windows XP to find out if it shares those vulnerabilities,” he wrote. “If it does, attackers will attempt to develop exploit code that could reap the benefits of these windows 7 home basic product key vulnerabilities on Windows XP. Due to the fact a safety update will never ever turn out to be available for Windows XP to address these vulnerabilities, Windows XP will primarily possess a ‘zero-day’ vulnerability forever.”
Zero-day vulnerabilities refer to the way in which hackers can attack an operating method or other code just before a patch is released, fixing the vulnerability. Considering that Microsoft will never patch Windows XP again following April 2014, sooner or later some vulneability that affects XP might be located.
Among July 2012 and July 2013, Windows XP was an affected item in 45 Microsoft security bulletins. Thirty of these also affected Windows 7 and Windows 8, Rains wrote.
Rains acknowledges that some protections in XP will enable mitigate attacks, and third-party antimalware application may supply some protection.
“The challenge here is that you’ll in no way know, with any confidence, in the event the trusted computing base of the program can basically be trusted because attackers are going to be armed with public know-how of zero day exploits in Windows XP that could enable them to compromise the method and possibly run the code of their decision,” Rains wrote.
That is the exact same argument that some have recently utilized, claiming that hackers will “bank” their zero-day XP attacks until soon after subsequent April, then unleash them around the unprotected herds of XP machines. As Rains notes, the sophistication of malware has only enhanced, which means that your XP machine is a lot more vulnerable, not significantly less. PCWorld’s Answer Line columnist, Lincoln Spector, agrees.
The issue that some XP users have is that they’re so in appreciate with all the way that Windows XP does things that they’re reluctant to migrate, in particular to Windows eight. Well, Windows 7 machines do exist, that offer functionality similar to XP: here’s the way to locate them.
The bottom line is this: although Microsoft stands to gain from arguing that buyers need to upgrade, the truth is: they do. So if you're nonetheless on Windows XP, begin thinking about a migration strategy.
http://www.windows7retailpack.com/microsoft-windows-7-professional-3264-bit-full-retail-pack-p-3527.html
Friday, 2 August 2013
Car hacking code released at Defcon
You may hate parallel parking, but you're going to hate it even more when
somebody commandeers control of your car with you in it.
That was the scary scenario painted over the first two hours at the 21st annual Defcon hacker conference.
"Car hacking is definitely coming," said Zoz, of Cannytophic Design, who presented on how to hack autonomous cars.
Zoz's talk on vulnerabilities that autonomous autos will face followed a fast-paced explanation by well-known computer security experts Charlie Miller and Christopher Valasek of how they spent the past 10 months hacking the self-driving features of two popular cars. Miller, Valasek, and Zoz all spoke to standing-room only crowds of more than 1,000 people.
While car hacking made a big splash at Defcon in 2010 and 2011, those hacks were not publicly documented. "We want it to take two months for everybody to do this," Miller said to loud applause from the packed house.
Before going into their hacking explanation, Miller and Valasek admitted that they were not hardware hackers, and had little experience on hardware basics like splicing wires. But they only had one requirement for their test car: that it be able to drive itself.
From there, hilarity ensued. Instead of following Toyota's guide to removing the dash of their test 2010 Prius, they used a crowbar. Subsequent videos and photos showed them driving around with a laptop wired to the open dash of a car, much to the amusement of the crowd.
The pair also tested a 2010 Ford Escape.
Prerecorded video demos of the hacks showed Miller and Valasek disabling the car's brakes, jerking the steering wheel back and forth while the car was in motion, accelerating, taking full control of the steering wheel, yanking the seat belt tight, turning off the engine, turning interior and exterior lights on and off, honking the horn, and making the console show a full tank of gas when it wasn't.
Surprisingly, neither wore a helmet.
At one point, the car wouldn't start, and they had to get it taken to the Toyota dealer for repairs. It turns out, Valasek said, that they had blown up the inverter. "They said they couldn't fix the car because they'd never seen this problem before."
The two detailed much of the nitty-gritty of their hacking work, covering how they gained physical access to the car's computer and how they figured out how to program the car's computer.
The documentation that they will be releasing in the next few weeks sounds comprehensive, totaling 101 pages of code and data.
Zoz spent his talk in the next hour on the future of automation. Self-driving cars, he told, are essentially robots and will be particularly susceptible to the same kinds of hacks as less complicated robots.
Many of these vulnerabilities will be related to directly hacking or indirectly altering the sensors that allow a car to navigate the road without causing accidents. Automated vehicles of all sorts, from person-carrying cars to small drones, rely on a multitude of sensors such as GPS, LIDAR, cameras, millimeter wave radar, digital compasses, wheel encoders, inertial measurement units, and on-board maps.
There are two kinds of sensor attacks, Zoz said. Denial attacks prevent the sensor from recovering data, while spoofing causes the sensor to retrieve bad data.
Each of the sensors on a car or drone can be successfully attacked in several low-cost, low-effort ways. A GPS sensor, he said, can be compromised by purchasing or building a cheap GPS jammer.
Maps are particularly at risk. "You can't have your robot occasionally blowing through a red light," he said to much snickering from the audience.
Zoz, as well as Miller and Valasek, kept returning to a particular point during their separate hour-long presentations: the goal of hacking cars isn't to cause widespread havoc, but to make them safer.
"Now that we've released the data, you can think about how to stop these attacks," Miller said.
And echoing Miller, Zoz also highlighted safety concerns. "When I talk about exploits and countermeasures, I want you to think about counter-countermeasures," he said.
Ford and Toyota have both said that their focus is on preventing wireless hacks, but wireless technology is hardly a bastion of security. We may be approaching an era when the car itself could be to blame for crashes.
That was the scary scenario painted over the first two hours at the 21st annual Defcon hacker conference.
"Car hacking is definitely coming," said Zoz, of Cannytophic Design, who presented on how to hack autonomous cars.
Zoz's talk on vulnerabilities that autonomous autos will face followed a fast-paced explanation by well-known computer security experts Charlie Miller and Christopher Valasek of how they spent the past 10 months hacking the self-driving features of two popular cars. Miller, Valasek, and Zoz all spoke to standing-room only crowds of more than 1,000 people.
While car hacking made a big splash at Defcon in 2010 and 2011, those hacks were not publicly documented. "We want it to take two months for everybody to do this," Miller said to loud applause from the packed house.
Before going into their hacking explanation, Miller and Valasek admitted that they were not hardware hackers, and had little experience on hardware basics like splicing wires. But they only had one requirement for their test car: that it be able to drive itself.
From there, hilarity ensued. Instead of following Toyota's guide to removing the dash of their test 2010 Prius, they used a crowbar. Subsequent videos and photos showed them driving around with a laptop wired to the open dash of a car, much to the amusement of the crowd.
The pair also tested a 2010 Ford Escape.
Prerecorded video demos of the hacks showed Miller and Valasek disabling the car's brakes, jerking the steering wheel back and forth while the car was in motion, accelerating, taking full control of the steering wheel, yanking the seat belt tight, turning off the engine, turning interior and exterior lights on and off, honking the horn, and making the console show a full tank of gas when it wasn't.
Surprisingly, neither wore a helmet.
At one point, the car wouldn't start, and they had to get it taken to the Toyota dealer for repairs. It turns out, Valasek said, that they had blown up the inverter. "They said they couldn't fix the car because they'd never seen this problem before."
The two detailed much of the nitty-gritty of their hacking work, covering how they gained physical access to the car's computer and how they figured out how to program the car's computer.
The documentation that they will be releasing in the next few weeks sounds comprehensive, totaling 101 pages of code and data.
Zoz spent his talk in the next hour on the future of automation. Self-driving cars, he told, are essentially robots and will be particularly susceptible to the same kinds of hacks as less complicated robots.
Many of these vulnerabilities will be related to directly hacking or indirectly altering the sensors that allow a car to navigate the road without causing accidents. Automated vehicles of all sorts, from person-carrying cars to small drones, rely on a multitude of sensors such as GPS, LIDAR, cameras, millimeter wave radar, digital compasses, wheel encoders, inertial measurement units, and on-board maps.
There are two kinds of sensor attacks, Zoz said. Denial attacks prevent the sensor from recovering data, while spoofing causes the sensor to retrieve bad data.
Each of the sensors on a car or drone can be successfully attacked in several low-cost, low-effort ways. A GPS sensor, he said, can be compromised by purchasing or building a cheap GPS jammer.
Maps are particularly at risk. "You can't have your robot occasionally blowing through a red light," he said to much snickering from the audience.
Zoz, as well as Miller and Valasek, kept returning to a particular point during their separate hour-long presentations: the goal of hacking cars isn't to cause widespread havoc, but to make them safer.
"Now that we've released the data, you can think about how to stop these attacks," Miller said.
And echoing Miller, Zoz also highlighted safety concerns. "When I talk about exploits and countermeasures, I want you to think about counter-countermeasures," he said.
Ford and Toyota have both said that their focus is on preventing wireless hacks, but wireless technology is hardly a bastion of security. We may be approaching an era when the car itself could be to blame for crashes.
XP stay by far the most widely-used operating systems
Windows 8 keeps clawing its way up the marketplace share charts, but not at
the expense of Windows 7 or Windows XP.
According to Netmarketshare, Windows 8’s marketplace share now stands at 5.4 %, up 0.three % from a month ago when it ultimately surpassed Windows Vista. As soon as once again, Vista’s industry share declined final month, this time by about 0.38 %, to a total of 4.24 percent.
Meanwhile, Windows 7 and Windows XP are holding powerful. In truth, Windows 7’s market place share elevated final month by 0.12 %, and Windows XP saw a 0.02 % bump in industry share regardless of the looming end of XP help by Microsoft. Each Windows 7 and XP stay by far the most widely-used operating systems by far, with 44.49 % and 37.19 percent from the market place, respectively, in accordance with Netmarketshare.
In other words, any marketplace share that Windows eight gained final month appears to be in the expense of Windows Vista.
Though it is not surprising that customers are eager to upgrade in the widely-panned operating system, having people today to switch from XP or Windows 7 could be tougher for Microsoft, in particular amongst users who want to stick with a regular desktop interface.
Windows eight.1 will make some concessions for all those customers, together with the return on the Start out button, a boot-to-desktop option, quicker access to advanced desktop functions, along with a solution to stop modern-style menus from popping up through desktop use.
But ultimately, Microsoft and Computer makers ought to convince the masses that they will need to upgrade their hardware to touch-enabled laptops, hybrids, or desktops. More affordable touchscreen devices could assistance on that front, but it’ll likely be a while just before the marketplace share needle moves significantly for Windows XP and Windows 7.
According to Netmarketshare, Windows 8’s marketplace share now stands at 5.4 %, up 0.three % from a month ago when it ultimately surpassed Windows Vista. As soon as once again, Vista’s industry share declined final month, this time by about 0.38 %, to a total of 4.24 percent.
Meanwhile, Windows 7 and Windows XP are holding powerful. In truth, Windows 7’s market place share elevated final month by 0.12 %, and Windows XP saw a 0.02 % bump in industry share regardless of the looming end of XP help by Microsoft. Each Windows 7 and XP stay by far the most widely-used operating systems by far, with 44.49 % and 37.19 percent from the market place, respectively, in accordance with Netmarketshare.
In other words, any marketplace share that Windows eight gained final month appears to be in the expense of Windows Vista.
Though it is not surprising that customers are eager to upgrade in the widely-panned operating system, having people today to switch from XP or Windows 7 could be tougher for Microsoft, in particular amongst users who want to stick with a regular desktop interface.
Windows eight.1 will make some concessions for all those customers, together with the return on the Start out button, a boot-to-desktop option, quicker access to advanced desktop functions, along with a solution to stop modern-style menus from popping up through desktop use.
But ultimately, Microsoft and Computer makers ought to convince the masses that they will need to upgrade their hardware to touch-enabled laptops, hybrids, or desktops. More affordable touchscreen devices could assistance on that front, but it’ll likely be a while just before the marketplace share needle moves significantly for Windows XP and Windows 7.
Tuesday, 23 July 2013
iPhone sales soar but lackluster earnings put pressure on Apple
With Apple's (AAPL) announcement Tuesday of record iPhone sales but another
round of lackluster earnings, the pressure is turned on high.
Apple and CEO Tim Cook now face a nearly six-month trial by fire. After changing the world with the iPhone and iPad, the tech icon has seen its performance slow and its stock price plummet, in large part because of a glaring absence of new products. Investor and fan fervor is cooling, and some experts say time could be running out for Apple to prove it still has the mojo that co-founder Steve Jobs unleashed upon the world.
"Everyone is watching and everyone knows that this is either the earnings trough -- it better be the earnings trough -- or else Apple is in real trouble," said Laurence Balter, an analyst atOracle (ORCL) Investment Research. "It's important for management to communicate to shareholders that this is not the end for Apple, but rather the beginning of the next phase. And they really need to say that because shareholders have lost faith."
But while analyst Colin Gillis with BGC Financial conceded that "Apple's flagship product is doing just fine," he said that Cook, after having proved himself to be a "fantastic" chief operating officer, needs to prove himself as CEO.
Analysts agree that Apple must not only say the right things in coming months, but come up with another blockbuster, such as a new and improved Apple TV.
Balter said the next obvious chapter in the Apple story is the integration of the iPhone into the rest of our lives, such as our cars and kitchens and living rooms. Others think Apple could recapture the groove it found with the 2007 launch of the first iPhone by jiggering the shape and size of existing products.
"We will be looking for signs of new products such as the low-priced handset," Societe Generale analyst Andy Perkins wrote in a note to investors, "and possibly the iWatch."
What Apple pulls out of its hat in the next few months could be far more important than the comparatively tepid earnings it reported Tuesday. Its revenues were $35.3 billion, slightly above analysts' estimates of $35 billion and essentially flat with the same quarter last year.
It reported profit of $6.9 billion, or $7.47 a share, above analysts' estimates of $7.33 a share in a survey by FactSet but well below the $9.32 a share it reported a year ago.
In the most encouraging number in the otherwise lackluster earnings, the company said it had sold 31.2 million iPhones, setting a record for the June quarter and handily beating the 26.5 million analysts had expected it to sell.
Before the announcement, Apple shares had closed at $418.99, down $7.32, or nearly 2 percent. But the stock was up about 4 percent in after-hours trading.
Meanwhile, analysts are forecasting little or no revenue growth in Apple's current fourth quarter for the first time since the debut of the iPhone six years ago. They expect $35 billion in revenue again.
Clearly, Apple has lost the red-hot momentum it had going into the end of 2012, when it announced the iPhone 5 to great critical acclaim.
It's been an underwhelming year so far for Apple, prompting many to wonder if the tech icon has run adrift. Investor angst has hammered the company's stock price, at one point dragging it below $400 a share after it was hovering near $700 a year earlier. After years of exciting launches, including variations of the iPhone and iPad, there've been no new product announcements in 2013.
"This has been a very tough period for Apple and it's made worse by the fact that the company doesn't talk openly with people, so you don't know what's really going on inside," said analyst Roger Kay with Endpoint Technologies. "But it does seem as if there's been a dearth of announcements the entire year and the momentum Apple had before is almost entirely dissipated."
Kay said it's now showtime. Apple needs to prove it still has the goods, he said, and it needs to start talking about them "in the next few weeks."
Or as fellow analyst Van Baker with Gartner Research put it:
Apple and CEO Tim Cook now face a nearly six-month trial by fire. After changing the world with the iPhone and iPad, the tech icon has seen its performance slow and its stock price plummet, in large part because of a glaring absence of new products. Investor and fan fervor is cooling, and some experts say time could be running out for Apple to prove it still has the mojo that co-founder Steve Jobs unleashed upon the world.
"Everyone is watching and everyone knows that this is either the earnings trough -- it better be the earnings trough -- or else Apple is in real trouble," said Laurence Balter, an analyst atOracle (ORCL) Investment Research. "It's important for management to communicate to shareholders that this is not the end for Apple, but rather the beginning of the next phase. And they really need to say that because shareholders have lost faith."
But while analyst Colin Gillis with BGC Financial conceded that "Apple's flagship product is doing just fine," he said that Cook, after having proved himself to be a "fantastic" chief operating officer, needs to prove himself as CEO.
Analysts agree that Apple must not only say the right things in coming months, but come up with another blockbuster, such as a new and improved Apple TV.
Balter said the next obvious chapter in the Apple story is the integration of the iPhone into the rest of our lives, such as our cars and kitchens and living rooms. Others think Apple could recapture the groove it found with the 2007 launch of the first iPhone by jiggering the shape and size of existing products.
"We will be looking for signs of new products such as the low-priced handset," Societe Generale analyst Andy Perkins wrote in a note to investors, "and possibly the iWatch."
What Apple pulls out of its hat in the next few months could be far more important than the comparatively tepid earnings it reported Tuesday. Its revenues were $35.3 billion, slightly above analysts' estimates of $35 billion and essentially flat with the same quarter last year.
It reported profit of $6.9 billion, or $7.47 a share, above analysts' estimates of $7.33 a share in a survey by FactSet but well below the $9.32 a share it reported a year ago.
In the most encouraging number in the otherwise lackluster earnings, the company said it had sold 31.2 million iPhones, setting a record for the June quarter and handily beating the 26.5 million analysts had expected it to sell.
Before the announcement, Apple shares had closed at $418.99, down $7.32, or nearly 2 percent. But the stock was up about 4 percent in after-hours trading.
Meanwhile, analysts are forecasting little or no revenue growth in Apple's current fourth quarter for the first time since the debut of the iPhone six years ago. They expect $35 billion in revenue again.
Clearly, Apple has lost the red-hot momentum it had going into the end of 2012, when it announced the iPhone 5 to great critical acclaim.
It's been an underwhelming year so far for Apple, prompting many to wonder if the tech icon has run adrift. Investor angst has hammered the company's stock price, at one point dragging it below $400 a share after it was hovering near $700 a year earlier. After years of exciting launches, including variations of the iPhone and iPad, there've been no new product announcements in 2013.
"This has been a very tough period for Apple and it's made worse by the fact that the company doesn't talk openly with people, so you don't know what's really going on inside," said analyst Roger Kay with Endpoint Technologies. "But it does seem as if there's been a dearth of announcements the entire year and the momentum Apple had before is almost entirely dissipated."
Kay said it's now showtime. Apple needs to prove it still has the goods, he said, and it needs to start talking about them "in the next few weeks."
Or as fellow analyst Van Baker with Gartner Research put it:
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