Personal printers are a fantastic commodity. Personal printers have allowed for the practical liberation of information and, together with the many functionalities of internet have turned bits of electricity into knowledge, art and entertainment at our fingertips. Inexpensive printing for business have made much easier to dispense graphic marketing, forward company-wide memos and even send complimentary football tickets to someone that lives on the other side of the world. While personal printers do seem to come from the magical world of fairy tales the truth cuts as a double edged sword: we are using a mighty huge amount of paper and ink with our newly found power to put everything down on an A4 sheet.

Enjoy!

As the Linux Foundation tells it, the Linux-related job market is today 80 percent larger than it was five years ago. Whereas other industries have had to shed workers in the current recession, the Foundation is hopeful penny-pinching measures might actually encourage businesses to transition to Linux-based software and thereby further stimulate employment opportunities within the sector. We’re not told exactly what “Linux-related” means in this context, but the newly set up Linux.com Job Board indicates that the vast majority of new openings are for system admins. That’s right, the corporate world is crying out for more geeks — won’t you answer the call?

[Thanks to Overlord59 for the Tux images]

We just got an interesting news tip pointing to the HTC Twitter account from Russia. The tweet mentions that the only HTC device currently on the market to receive a Windows Mobile 7 upgrade will be the HD2. And we’ve suspected this for a while, considering that the HD2 meets Microsoft’s hardware requirements for Windows Mobile 7. Here’s what they said:

for Diamond 2 firmware is not planned. Of the existing communicators on the market, only the HD2 firmware to get WM7.

Hopefully what we see here is a true (and considering that this was said by an official HTC rep, it should be), because the HD2 is going to turn out to be one of the most popular smartphones of all time. If it’s getting an upgrade to 7, this will make a lot of people happy.

Thanks for the tip, av8612.

Source:  Prevx

Much to Ballmer’s chagrin, Windows Mobile 7 is still a rather nebulous thing, but it’s getting a wee bit clearer thanks to some bits and bytes extracted from the LinkedIn profiles of current and former Microsofties and Motorolites, the latter group indicating the company that brought you the Droid is also rather committed to Microsoft’s theoretical new hotness.

Various experience line-items reveal that the OS will support Silverlight (natch), will have a new navigation app, and will include much better game support along with some sort of Zune integration — finally. Now, any guesses on how many people will lose their jobs for being so open about what those positions entail?

Google will let its Gears offline utility essentially languish as it attempts to move the Web forward into HTML 5.0, Google executives said Monday.

According to Linus Upson, the engineering director at Google, Gears’ time has come and gone. The technology will be supported for compatibility’s sake, but not improved upon.

“Yes, we are not driving forward in any meaningful way [on Gears],” Upson said in an interview. “We are continuing to maintain it, so that applications will continue to work; we don’t want to break anything out there.”

Google Gears was originally launched in 2007 as a tool for allowing Web-based Google applications to work offline, like rivals Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes. But in May of 2008, Google used its I/O Conference to make a push for HTML 5.0 and capabilities that include the ability to cache apps and databases, and apply canvas, video, and geolocation tags. A “web worker” tag also allows for the background processing of Javascript, a tool to avoid, in one executive’s words, “hosing” a Web browser by monopolizing its CPU cycles.

HTML 5.0, in Google’s view, is the future. One indication of that direction has been the inclusion of the “My Location” feature in Google Maps, which attempts to use geolocation to identify the user’s position.

“We’re very focused on moving HTML 5 forward, and that’s where we’re putting all of our energy,” Upson said. “When we started the Gears project, three years ago, maybe three and a half years ago now, we did it because we couldn’t get the browser vendors interested in building offline applications. And so, so we said, okay, we’ll build a plugin that could do it. And lo and behold, once we shipped Gears, suddenly the browser vendors got very interested in adding capabilities to build offline applications.

“And so, I think Gears has accomplished its mission very well, in getting these capabilities into HTML 5,” Upson added. “In fact, the team that designed Gears was also instrumental in designing the HTML 5 versions of those APIs. You can almost think of what’s in HTML 5, with app cache, and database, and those things, as essentially Gears [version] 2, and that’s how we view it.”

Put another way, the goal of HTML 5.0 is to avoid “plug-in prison,” the requirement to call a variety of plug-ins to make various capabilities actually work, according to Jay Sullivan, a Mozilla Foundation vice president, who spoke at Google I/O last year. Opera Mobile added Gears capability last year as well, following Google’s own mobile Gears implementation in March 2008.

Upson, who runs both the Chrome browser and Chrome OS engineering teams, said he’s readying the Mac version of Chrome for a release by the end of the year, as originally planned. He did not directly address reports that said Gears would be left out of the Mac version of the Chrome browser, as Apple’s Mac OS X reportedly does not support it. But he confirmed that that was the direction that Chrome would take.

“We want to move all applications to just use standards based HTML 5 APIs, and not focus on Gears going forward,” Upson added. “And now that we’re a browser vendor, we can help move HTML 5 forward not as a plug-in, but as part of Chrome.”

Windows 7 isn’t just getting good reviews, it’s also selling well, CEO Steve Ballmer told shareholders Thursday.

Delivering opening remarks at Microsoft’s shareholder meeting, Ballmer said that Windows 7 was off to a “fantastic start.”

“We’ve already sold twice as many units as any OS in a comparable time frame,” Ballmer said. “Windows 7 is simply the best PC operating system that we or anyone else has ever built.” 

By last week, Windows 7 accounted for 4 percent of Web-accessing devices, according to Net Applications; it took Vista more than seven months to reach that level.

Addressing the overall economy, Ballmer reiterated that things seem to have stabilized.

“The economy has, at least for now, leveled off,” he said.

The meeting is still going on and has just entered the question-and-answer session and I’ll update this post if anything interesting comes up. So far, though, it’s been mostly about local and legislative matters, rather than technological issues.

Microsoft vs. Apple
There was one fun one from a shareholder who noted that young people tend to gravitate toward Macs and that Apple seems to be outmarketing Microsoft.

“You’ve got a real bad image out there,” the shareholder said. “You sure don’t have that younger generation.”

Ballmer acknowledged that there are “certainly always opportunities for improvement.”

“We all watch television,” he said.

That said, Ballmer noted that “96 times out of 100, worldwide, people choose a PC with Windows.”

He added that even in the toughest market–the high end of the U.S. consumer market–Windows is chosen 83 times out of 100.

“That doesn’t let us rest on our laurels,” Ballmer said. “Apple has picked up a couple tenths of a percent of market share.”

But those couple tenths matter, he agreed. He said the downturn in the economy has actually bolstered Windows’ competitive position. “People understand that Macintoshes are quite a bit more expensive.”

Another questioner asked why Microsoft can’t better compete against Apple’s iPhone and other smartphones.

“Certainly our objective is to have the leading position,” Ballmer said. “I think we have a lot of opportunity to improve…Undoubtedly we’ve got our work cut out for us.”

He did say that Microsoft has put a lot of smart people on the task.

“We’ve got our heads down to do our best,” Ballmer said.

Source: CNET

Toshiba America Information Systems introduced entry-level unified messaging server hardware for small to medium-sized businesses.

Strata Messaging is compatible with TAIS’ Strata CIX family of Internet-based business communications systems. The new product, which is available through the company’s dealers nationwide, is marketed as offering unified messaging to SMBs at a “very affordable price.”

“In the past, small to medium businesses had to purchase expensive equipment for unified messaging features,” Ron Hunsaker, senior product manager for TAIS’ telecommunications systems division, said in a statement.

Strata Messaging is sized and priced for TAIS’ smaller voice over IP systems, the Strata CIX40 and CIX100. The new product supports two to eight ports of voice mail, up to 400 mailboxes and has 300 hours of storage. The base system package offers two voice mail ports and 10 seats of unified messaging.

Strata Messaging, introduced Tuesday, is deployed on an external Linux-based appliance that connects to the Strata CIX through IP channels.

A major advantage of unified messaging is having one repository for e-mail, fax, voice mail, instant messaging and even video conferencing. The technology is particularly useful to companies that depend on staying connected, since a unified messaging system marries asynchronous applications such as store-and-forward e-mail with real-time applications that incorporate unified communications.

Today, implementation of unified communications platforms have been complicated by the tug of war between the types of devices employees want to use and the pragmatic concerns over security in running a business. With the iPhone, Macintosh computers, Linux PCs and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter infiltrating the workforce, most enterprises are looking for ways to support the diversity of systems and devices.

In approaching the problem, Bruce Morse, IBM’s VP of unified communications and collaboration, recently advised attendees of VoiceCon 2009 in San Francisco to look for solutions that incorporate collaborative technologies as an important part of business communications.

Following the release of Microsoft’s improved Wireless N Networking Adapter for Xbox 360, Mad Catz has announced its own wireless adapter, which improves upon Microsoft’s device in a couple of ways. First, the adapter, essentially an Ethernet bridge, works with the PS3, allowing for the use of the 802.11n standard with Sony’s console.

Second, and most importantly, the Mad Catz adapter improves upon the most reviled feature of the Microsoft model: the price. At $79.99 (£49.99/€59.99 in the UK and Europe), the Mad Catz Wireless-N Gaming Adapter is no impulse buy, but it’s exactly twenty dollars better than Microsoft’s version. Mad Catz told Joystiq that its device is currently shipping to North American and European retailers and will be available in the company’s online store this week.

[Via Joystiq]

Microsoft late has confirmed that an unpatched vulnerability exists in Windows 7, but is downplaying the problem, saying most users would be protected from attack by blocking two ports at the firewall.

In a security advisory, Microsoft acknowledged that a bug in SMB (Server Message Block), a Microsoft-made network file- and print-sharing protocol, could be used by attackers to cripple Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 machines.

The zero-day vulnerability was first reported by Canadian researcher Laurent Gaffie last Wednesday, when he revealed the bug and posted proof-of-concept attack code to the Full Disclosure security mailing list and his blog. According to Gaffie, exploiting the flaw crashes Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 systems so thoroughly that the only recourse is to manually power off the computers.

At the time, Microsoft only said it was investigating Gaffie’s reports.

Then on Friday, it took the next step and issued the advisory.

“Microsoft is aware of public, detailed exploit code that would cause a system to stop functioning or become unreliable,” Dave Forstrom, a spokesman for Microsoft security group, said in an email. “The company is not aware of attacks to exploit the reported vulnerability at this time.”

Forstrom echoed Gaffie’s comments earlier in the week that while an exploit could incapacitate a PC, the vulnerability could not be used by hackers to install malicious code on a Windows 7 system.

Both SMBv1 and its successor, SMBv2, contain the bug.

“Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000 are not affected,” assured Forstrom.

Attacks could be aimed at any browser, not just Internet Explorer (IE), Microsoft warned. After tricking users into visiting a malicious site or a previously-compromised domain, hackers could feed them specially-crafted URIs (uniform resource identifier), and then crash their PCs with malformed SMB packets.

Microsoft said it may patch the problem, but didn’t spell out a timetable or commit to an out-of-cycle update before the next regularly-scheduled Patch Tuesday of December 8. Instead, the company suggested users block TCP ports 139 and 445 at the firewall. Doing so, however, would disable browsers as well as a host of critical services, including network file-sharing and IT group policies.

Gaffie’s vulnerability was the first zero-day reported and confirmed by Microsoft in Windows 7 since the new operating system went on sale October 22.