Microsoft includes a issue with partners

　　The optimist would say that Windows Phone's prospects have by no means been brighter. The pessimist would disagree.
　　Around the vibrant side, Microsoft just announced Windows Telephone eight Update three, which includes new support for quad-core CPUs and phablets that assists keep its spec lists seeking fresh. Additionally, the buyout of Nokia's smartphone arm will bring Redmond's biggest hardware ally entirely into the fold, all whilst BlackBerry's apparent demise topples the competitors for third-largest ecosystem. All this provides the application giant a opportunity  windows 7 professional retail version  to no less than double Windows Telephone development by 2017.
　　On the other hand, Windows Phone adoption has been slow, together with the OS fighting for significantly less than ten percent of mobile's global market share, even though Android and iOS gobble up the overwhelming majority.
　　Moreover, Microsoft includes a issue with partners. At the moment it is trying to woo back HTC to after once more expand the Windows Telephone ecosystem. If that fails, Microsoft may very well be the only outfit generating Windows phones. That single-source technique may well perform for Apple, but even the iPhone is possessing a difficult time standing as much as Android's diverse and seemingly inexhaustible players.
　　Back in 2010, and once more in 2011, Microsoft pleaded for patience in receiving its Windows Telephone off the ground. But this year, the newest update's most visible enhancements are a modified interface for extra-large phones as well as the capability to close apps in multitasking mode. You also can customize text tones by make contact with.
　　This is hardly hearty fare, but Microsoft points out that they are the most-wanted additions requested by fans.
　　Nonetheless, Windows Phone shoppers also clamor for a notification center, a file manager, a personal assistant, superior storage assistance for microSD cards, and indicator lights that signal missed calls and alerts. Several of these have been requested because the OS debuted and have lengthy existed on Android and iOS.
　　Then there is Skype, the other business that Microsoft bought in 2011 (and for 1.three billion greater than Nokia), but the enterprise has however to integrate it into Windows smartphones by default to counter Apple's FaceTime and even Google Plus Hangouts. Yes, Windows Phone 8 Skype customers can place calls from the Individuals hub, after 1st downloading the app. What I'm speaking about is producing this an out-of-the-box function.
　　We do know, at the least, that Microsoft is challenging at work on a private assistant of its own known as Cortana, which understands natural language and can replace the legacy TellMe voice input at present in use.
　　Microsoft's next update need to be a major one particular that includes this individual assistant, notification center, and Skype integration at the incredibly least. Just after the Nokia acquisition is complete (assuming it gets shareholder and regulatory approval), Windows Phone should quickly incorporate Nokia-designed application tools, like its camera add-ons, in to the native OS expertise.
　　From exactly where I sit, Microsoft's biggest asset -- and challenge -- is usually to take the major risks that make a organization stand out as a player worth paying interest to. After the transition, the Windows Telephone group need to not just use, but push Nokia's venerable style philosophy into edgier territory.
　　Microsoft ought to waste no time funding projects that discover and apply new finishes and components (like continuing its work on graphene), publish a few wacky proofs of notion (like this 1 from 2011, also under), and probably make a high-end luxury phone of its own.
　　Why? Microsoft's Windows Telephone project has spent its lifetime getting reactionary, trying to catch as much as Apple and Google devoid of truly managing to maintain pace. This isn't the time for you to be conservative with cookie-cutter style and characteristics which might be just good sufficient.

Apple iPhone 5s: My First Week

　　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.

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.
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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.

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.

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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.

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.