Apple iPhones Outsell Android Smartphones

The Apple Inc. iPhone reportedly outsold Android devices at AT&T corporate retail stores by a whopping 7.8-to-1 ratio between Dec. 1 and Dec. 27.

According to The Mac Observer, those AT&T stores sold about 981,000 iPhones during the period, accounting for a heavy 66 percent of the turnover.

By comparison, the same stores sold about 126,000 Android devices over the period, accounting for a light 8.5 percent of the turnover.

The report noted that even basic flip and slider phones did better than the Android devices, as the same stores sold about 128,000 of those dinosaurs.

Research In Motion Ltd. -- makers of the BlackBerry line of smartphones -- finished third in sales, as AT&T moved only about 74,000 of them. Microsoft Windows Phone 7 phones reportedly did even worse.

Do-it-yourself iPhone Projector - YouTube

The first person to invent a DiY projector by someone named Dylan who tags himself as a Household Hacker. The video shows how to make your own version of iPhone projector.

BYOD: ‘bring your own device’ How will it impact your company

In case you haven't heard, the Bring Your Own device to work strategy is doing the rounds in the more enlightened corporate IT world and is a very attractive option for Developers, Administrators and other IT geeks of that ilk.

That aside, as a non-geek, BYOD will require serious attention to the infrastructure and support policies within your organisation.

The one really good reason not to let employees use their own smartphone, notebook or tablet at work, is because it creates an IT management nightmare.

Firstly or blatantly, there are inherent security and regulatory compliance risks. Unless you have complete control or have great faith the responsibility of IT geeks to protect their own assets.

Even if you restrict and /or allow certain products or technologies that people can bring and use, it will be next to impossible to make sure everyone keeps their machines updated with the proper OS and application patches.

If you use the argument that BYOD will save the company money on assets, their maintenance and their depreciation, you may be disappointed. Many businesses supporting BYOD expect employees to buy and support devices at their own expense but the boundary between the BYOD asset an dthe infrastructure and security policies behind that may be blurred.

Consequently, there is a high risk of holes opening up in your Securoty, DMZ and Firewall. The money not spent on assets may have to be diverted to protect the infrastructure and will require the development of new IT management policies. Can you say your organization is BOYD ready?

To simplify small and midsize businesses (SMEs) should be prepared to sense BYOD and it's impact in the following ways.

#1: Your technology upgrade cycles will be shorter
Most smartphones are turned over every one or two years, because of carrier contracts. That means employees will be exposed to new features more quickly and be able to keep up with business enhancing features made available on open platforms e.g. Skype, Social media, etc.

#2: You will need to consider supporting or including more devices, not fewer
Even if your company chooses not to let employees bring their own smartphones, consumer tablets or notebooks into their work setting, it will need to consider adding more devices to the menu that allows people to work whilst travelling. Consider this an evolution of your corporate benefits or perks strategies. People should be able to choose their own device for work, even if they don’t own them outright.

#3: You need to rethink how you distribute applications
Thanks to Apple, most of us have become really familiar with the idea that you can download pretty much any application you need from searchable store. Over time, employees will come to expect the same from our IT team. Updates and upgrades will be enforced through alerts, much like the store concept.

#4: You need to raise your game on mobile security
Mobile malware and antivirus software packages exist, but they haven’t been widely used. If you allow people to bring their own mobile device, that needs to change. What’s more, your organisation will need to govern what data can and cannot be downloaded locally. That’s especially true in certain industries, especially healthcare or financial services where the Data Protection Act is very pertinent.

#5: You need to rethink the concept of mobility.
IDC expects the number of mobile workers worldwide to surpass 1.2 billion by 2013. Why would you provision someone with a desktop computer, even if it is a person who traditionally works in a back office position, if there is a chance that he or she might need greater flexibility in the future?

Forrester Research predicts that up to 60 percent of information workers will need to work in some location outside their office during the average workweek. Does that number fit well with your asset projections for notebook computers, media tablets or smartphones in your organisation?

Bring Your Own Device to work certainly has an allure and attraction from an financial asset management perspective and as a motivator for Developers and IT Geeks but have we thought this all the way through and are we, and our organisations really ready to adopt this strategy.

iPhone keylogger: Snooping on desktop typing

Security researchers have discovered they can detect the vibrations caused by using a computer keyboard and read off what is being typed simply by placing a smartphone with a keylogging app on the desk nearby.

Patrick Traynor and colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta were able to use the motion sensors inside an iPhone to read keystrokes from a keyboard 5 centimetres away with up to 80 per cent accuracy.

The sensors don't recognise the vibrations of particular individual keys, but for consecutive pairs of keystrokes they can tell whether the keys are on the left or right of the keyboard and how close together they are.

This information is then matched to a dictionary to recreate the typed word. For example, the word "canoe" breaks down into four pairs: "CA", "AN", "NO" and "OE". The first pair is classified as left-left-near, the second is left-right-far, and so on.

The resulting patterns aren't unique to a particular word, but they are good enough to reconstruct a message when you already know something about its contents.

The team tested their algorithm on a dictionary of 799 words such as "mayor" and "ballot" gathered from news articles about an election in Chicago.

The algorithm provided its best guesses for matching patterns to words, identifying the correct word as a first guess 40 per cent of the time and as one of the top five guesses 80 per cent of the time.

"Context can help us figure out what was really typed when mistakes are made," says Traynor – and a human attacker could fill in the blanks by making their own guesses.

Read more at New Scientist

Time for a Fair Trade iPhone?

The suicides at Foxconn have highlighted the issue of highly stressful working conditions in the global electronics industry. Foxconn has responded with psychologists, punch bags, swimming pools, and asking employees to promise not to kill themselves.

But these moves do nothing to change the actual working conditions. Suicide numbers are a big red herring because even if they go down, huge numbers of workers will still suffer from low wages, long hours, and many other tough and unhealthy working conditions.

A recent BBC documentary series, “Blood, Sweat and Luxuries” took six young British consumers and placed them exotic locations working in the same jobs as locals, and having to survive on the same wages.

It’s an eye opening series because it showed the horrible work conditions that billions of people face daily, every week, for years, and decades. These were strong, healthy, young British adults, yet they would pass out from the back breaking work, suffer panic attacks, and many other maladies, after just a few hours on the job.

They carried huge amounts of dirt in Ghana’s gold fields; they processed leather in stinking abattoirs in Ethiopia; they dug deep holes in coffee plantations; and they had to work in an electronics factory in the Philippines where workers prepared tiny components for disk drives, processing one component every 3 seconds.

If they even took a moment to glance up from their tasks, or be distracted, they would fall behind in their quota and have their wages docked. It was incredible how much work had to be done for so little money by so many people. And the reason they were paid so little is that the electronics factory had to accept tiny profit margins in order to win its contracts.

All the large tech companies such as Apple, Nokia, Dell, etc have agreements with their suppliers that they do not employ children, and that they will abide by certain standards to protect workers. But it’s not clear how these are monitored, enforced, or how much in common they share across the electronics industry.

What is common across the electronics industry is a relentless focus on reducing manufacturing costs, and the largest manufacturing cost is labor; which is why employees are pushed to work faster, while maintaining high quality work, and at the lowest wages acceptable.

China: No Country for iPhones and no Demand either

China Unicom has sold just five iPhones through a big online retail site in the two weeks since it opened the virtual store, the latest sign that the handset is suffering in China from its high price and lack of Wi-Fi.

An official iPhone store on Taobao.com, the biggest Chinese e-commerce Web site similar to eBay, has sold just two 8GB iPhones and three 16GB iPhones, according to figures on the site. The store launched in the middle of last month, a few weeks after China Unicom began offering the first official iPhones in China.

China Unicom is also selling iPhones through its own Web site, which does not list sale figures. But Taobao is China's top online retail site and many users turn to it to buy items like mobile phones and laptops.

The China Unicom iPhones have to compete with iPhones brought into the country from abroad, which users have bought since long before the official handset arrived.

No WiFi Feature
iPhones bought outside China have Wi-Fi, which was removed from the China Unicom iPhones to comply with local regulations. The official handset is also more expensive than iPhones bought elsewhere.

The 32GB iPhone 3GS with no service contract costs 6,999 yuan (US$1,024) in China, compared to about US$800 in nearby Hong Kong.

Old Timer IT Terms That You should Never Use: Stay Cool!

"I don't need a cloak to become invisible, Harry."

Do you know, or can you name, the one referred to as 'Dumbledore', in your office? No! Then I guess it's probably you!

If you’re old enough to remember the rise of silicon based technology, then you may need a refresher course when it comes to talking about "today's" technology.

Techie Term Checklist
You have here a short list of outdated techie terms, phrases that you shouldn’t be using at work anymore because they will make you seem old and a practioner of the ancient 'black' arts. This is especially true if you’re looking for a new job and on the interview trail. You should be talking about "cloud computing," not "ASPs" even though they are basically the same thing.

This list is also useful for you young whipper-snappers too. Now, when your elders and betters in the office use one of these terms, you can still laugh at them but at least you'll know what their talking about.

1. The Intranet

Popular in the mid-90s, the term "intranet" referred to a private network running the Internet Protocol and other Internet standards such as the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It was also used to describe an internal Web site that was hosted behind a firewall and was accessible only to employees. Today, every private network runs IP. So you can just use the term virtual private network or VPN to describe a private IP-based network.

2. Company based Extranets

An "extranet" referred to private network connections based on Internet standards such as IP and HTTP that extended outside an organisation, such as between business partners. Extranets often replaced point-to-point electronic data interchange (EDI) connections that used standards such as X12. Today, companies provide suppliers, resellers and other members of their supply chain with access to their VPNs.

3. Web Surfing

When is the last time you heard someone talk about surfing the Web? You know the term is out of date when your kids don’t know what it means. To teens and tweens, the Internet and the World Wide Web are one and the same thing. So it’s better to use the term "browsing" the Web if you want to be understood. Or you can just say "Google" since everyone uses that term as a verb.

4. Push Technology

The debate over the merits of "push" versus "pull" technology came to a head in 1996 with the release of the PointCast Network, a Web service that sent a steady stream of news to subscribers. However, PointCast and other push technology services required too much network bandwidth. Eventually, push technology evolved into RSS feeds, which remain the preferred method for publishing information to subscribers of the Internet. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.

5. Application Service Provider (ASPs)

During this decade, the term "Application Service Provider" evolved into "Software-as-a-Service." Both terms refer to a vendor hosting a software application and providing access to it over the Web. Customers buy the software on a subscription basis, rather than having to own and operate it themselves. ASP was a hot term prior to the dot-com bust. Then it was replaced by "SaaS." Now it’s cool to talk about "cloud computing."

6. Personal Digital Assistant (PDA)

Coined by former Apple CEO John Sculley back in 1992 when he unveiled the Apple Newton, the term "personal digital assistant" referred to a handheld computer. PDA was still in use in 1996, when the Palm Pilot was the hottest handheld in corporate America. Today, the preferred generic term for a handheld like a Blackberry or an iPhone is a "smartphone".

7. Internet Telephony

You need to purge the term "Internet telephony" from your vocabulary and switch to VoIP, for Voice over IP. Even the term VoIP is getting old-fashioned because pretty soon all telephone calls will be routed over the Internet rather than the Public Switched Telephone Network. It’s probably time to stop referring to the PSTN, too, because it is headed for the history books as all voice, data and video traffic is carried on the Internet.

8. Weblog

A blog is a shortened version of "Weblog," a term that emerged in the late 1990s to describe commentary that an individual publishes online. It spawned many words still in use such as "blogger" and "blogosphere." Nowadays, few people have time to blog so they are "microblogging," which is another word that’s heading out the door as people turn Twitter into a generic term for blasting out 140-character observations or opinions.

9. Thin Client

You have to give Larry Ellison credit for seeing many of the flaws in the client/server computing architecture and for popularizing the term "thin client" to refer to Oracle’s alternative terminal-like approach. In 1993, Ellison was touting thin clients as a way for large organizations to improve network security and manageability. Although thin clients never replaced PCs, the concept is similar to "virtual desktops" that are gaining popularity today as a way of supporting mobile workers.

10. World Wide Web

Nobody talks about the "World Wide Web" anymore, or the "Information Superhighway," for that matter. It’s just the Internet. It’s a distinction that Steve Czaban, the popular Fox Sports Radio talk show host, likes to mock when he refers to the "Worldwide Interweb." Nothing dates you more than pulling out one of those old-fashioned ways of referring to the Internet such as "infobahn" or "electronic highway."

The Unwritten Laws of Luddite Technology

What are the Basic Luddite PC Tech Laws?

Let's start with the so-called 'Brains of the Outfit', the 'Nerve Centre' - The PC, Laptop, Mac or 'computer'

• Law 1: For every fix that a Windows Update patch fixes, the update will break two other things on your PC
• Law 2: The risk that Windows will need to automatically install time-sucking critical updates on your PC, is directly proportional to your need to get your PC started
• Law 3: The hard drive always fails just before you were going to back it up.
• Law 4: Your data will get corrupted just before you plug in your new backup external drive or will be corrupted when plugging in your backup device..
• Law 5: Your backup plan is only as good as your last successful restore.
• Law 6: The number of USB ports on your PC or Mac will always be one less than you need at any given time.
• Law 7: Feeling the time pressure on you to fix a computer quickly, will cause you to take longer.
• Law 8: If you close the PC case and tighten all the screws before testing it, it won't work; If you test it before closing the case, it will be OK.

What are The Luddite Tech Support Rules?
Now that you've mastered the basic technology traps, you think you're ready to move on to Tech Support.

• Law 1: If you fix a computer for a friend or family member, you'll be their tech support for life.
• Law 2: If you Build a computer for someone else, then he/she also owns you for life!
• Law 3: Recommend a product that you've used with no problems, and the friend/family member who buys it will immediately descend into some sort of product return hellhole of retribution.
• Law 4: Show any smart or handy IT skills at work, and your company's IT department will start referring all their difficult coworkers to you, the Mr Fixit Guru Guy!
• Law 5: If it's broken and you call tech support, it will immediately fix itself while you're on hold or are still trying to press the correct buttons to get through the responding call centre's phone system.

What are The Luddite Internet Ordinances?
You can find a world of trouble online.

• Law 1: Within a month of agreeing to be "friends" with your boss on Facebook you will regret it, big time.
• Law 2: The crappier the Web site, the sleazier and sketchier the ads.
• Law 3: When entering "Captcha" verification codes on a Web site, you'll always type in the numeral 1 when the site wants a lowercase L, and a capital O when the site wants the number 0.
• Law 4: Just before taking out the boss in a WoW raid, your Internet connection will die.
• Law 5: The difficulty involved in redeeming a rebate is directly proportional to the monetary value of the rebate.
• Law 6: The safe draft of a nasty e-mail, will always somehow find its way to the (unintended) recipient.

What are The Luddite Precepts of Mobile Tech?
Desktop technology isn't the only source of inevitable woe in your life. All those shiny mobile devices can cause pain, too, since the freedom of untethered technology doesn't extend to immunity from rank on rank of frustrating unalterable laws.

We report 10 master Luddite Mobile Laws here.

• Law 1: The charger for your current cell phone will not work with the next cell phone you buy.
• Law 2: Your laptop's charger weighs half of what your laptop weighs and doesn't fit easily into the laptop carry bag.
• Law 3: A laptop battery will drain at twice its normal rate whenever you leave home without your power cord.
• Corollary: Your laptop's battery life is inversely proportional to the amount of work you need to get done on a single charge.
• Law 4: Your iPod or iPhone will be on its last burst of power just as the plane door shuts.
• Law 5: A replacement battery charger will cost 70 percent of the original purchase price of the whole device, including the laptop bag. For phones, the figure is 140 percent!
• Law 6: Your cell phone will inevitably break before your two-year contract is up, forcing you to overpay for a new, less-cool model.
• Law 7: The proprietary charging plug (cost to produce: 50 cents) for your device will disappear within two weeks and will cost you $40 to replace.
• Law 8: On any vacation, a) the memory card for your digital camera will be safely lodged in the card reader on your desk at home. b) The camera's proprietary re-chargeable battery will be dead, with the charger sitting next to the card reader.
• Law 9: A cup of coffee or fizzing drink on your desk, is guaranteed to render your laptop utterly useless.
• Law 10: Your MagSafe adapter will always come unplugged precisely when you need to charge your Mac laptop's battery.

What are The Luddite Software Statutes?
Finally, if entanglements with hardware principles don't leave you bound and gagged, there are always software standards to render you helpless.

• Law 1: Your software provider's online support pages contain explicit instructions for troubleshooting every conceivable problem, except yours.
• Law 2: Nine times out of ten, tinkering with your Registry to fix a system issue will create a new and more severe problem. Did you back it up before you started? Unlikely!
• Law 3: Ten times out of ten, downloading a spyware product will create hidden processes/services more insidious than the original malware/adware encroachment you set out to stop.
• Law 4: The performance increase you can expect from running a Registry cleaner can be calculated as z(n + y), where n is the number of Registry entries cleaned, y is your system CPU's clock speed in gigahertz, and z = 0, or near to it.
• Law 5: The larger the number of people who want your attractive iPhone app, the likelier Apple is to reject it.
• Law 6: iTunes will crash. That's it. No, really.