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http://cdn.mos.techradar.com/art/software/Windows/windows_81_rtm/tiles%20to%20download-470-75.jpgAfter a prolonged preview period, Microsoft has finally unleashed its much-anticipated update to the latest version of Windows on the unsuspecting world. Right from the off there were issues with it on Windows RT systems, resulting in the update application being removed from the store on tablets. There are no such problems on the PC, beyond a few hiccups with USB devices slowing down the update process. However, as the update is primarily available from the app store, it does make updating multiple machines a bit of a pain. Plus, as it stands if you want to install Windows 8.1 on a new build, or reinstall Windows from scratch, then you're looking at an overly lengthy process of installing Windows 8 first, patching it and then installing Windows 8.1. When you also consider that people who took part in the Windows 8.1 preview period can't update their machines directly, you start to wonder what Microsoft is really playing at. If you find yourself in such a situation, then you can in theory refresh back to the vanilla version of Windows 8, and then update from there. Alternatively, you can follow this tutorial to create a USB stick that has all your Windows 8.1 update needs answered. Key cutting There's actually a bit of problem here though, and that is in order to download the Windows 8.1 installation, you need a Win8.1 product key, which no one currently has. Luckily there is a solution, but it's a little fiddly: you'll have to start the installation process for Windows 8, close it, and then start the 8.1 install assistant. Once you have updated your machines you shouldn't have any complex tweaking to do; it should just be business as usual. However, we would recommend downloading and updating your graphics drivers, as there have been problems gaming on older drivers. Plus you don't want to just use the Microsoft drivers if you're looking to game. Step-by-step: Update to Win8.1 with ease 1. Find your key http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/PC%20Format/Issue%20286/PCF286.tut_5.walk_1-420-90.jpg Start by locating your Windows 8 key, as you'll need it as part of the installation. If you've bought a machine that comes pre-installed with Windows 8, then you should find the key on a sticker on your case somewhere. If you're still coming up empty handed, check out your paperwork; sometimes system integrators stick it to a piece of card and hide it with your motherboard manual. 2. Or… plan B http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/PC%20Format/Issue%20286/PCF286.tut_5.walk_2-420-90.jpg If you're still drawing a blank, then you need to grab a neat little app called Belarc Advisor (you can download it from here). Run this and it will perform a scan of your system before building a local web page that has a rundown of your system, including revealing your Windows 8 product key. Don't worry this isn't uploaded anywhere, it's for your eyes only. 3. False start http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/PC%20Format/Issue%20286/PCF286.tut_5.walk_3-420-90.jpg With your product key in hand, you can now start the process of grabbing the Windows 8.1 ISO. Point your favourite browser to the Windows download page and click on 'Install Windows 8' (don't click 'Install Windows 8.1'). This will start the installer assistant. Enter your product key and select 'Install by creating media'. Once it starts downloading, immediately close the installer. 4. Back again http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/PC%20Format/Issue%20286/PCF286.tut_5.walk_4-420-90.jpg You can now go back to the Windows Upgrade website and click the first link - this will be the one labelled 'Install Windows 8.1'. This will launch the newer install assistant, and is the one you actually want to use. Again, click the 'Install by creating media' option, but this time don't cancel it. This option enables you to create an installation using a USB stick or a DVD. 5. Choose wiselyhttp://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/PC%20Format/Issue%20286/PCF286.tut_5.walk_5-420-90.jpg We'd recommend going for a USB installation here, simply because it gives you the most options (you can upgrade machines that don't have an optical drive), and it's much quicker than installing from spinning media. You'll need a USB stick with at least 3GB of space available. It will take a while to create the image on the drive (depending on your connection), so go read a book or something. 6. Time to twerk http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/PC%20Format/Issue%20286/PCF286.tut_5.walk_6-420-90.jpg If you need to update a number of machines, it's a good idea to change the way the installer works so that it asks for the product key after installation. To do this, create a new file in the Sources folder called ei.cfg and enter the details as seen in the screenshot above. Save the changes onto your USB stick and you're good to go and start installing the update onto your machines. Now why not read 15 Windows 8.1 annoyances fixedhttp://rss.feedsportal.com/c/669/f/415085/s/3554b34b/sc/4/mf.gifhttp://res3.feedsportal.com/social/twitter.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/facebook.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/linkedin.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/googleplus.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/email.png http://da.feedsportal.com/r/184842497441/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3554b34b/sc/4/rc/1/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/184842497441/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3554b34b/sc/4/rc/2/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/184842497441/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3554b34b/sc/4/rc/3/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/184842497441/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3554b34b/a2.imghttp://pi.feedsportal.com/r/184842497441/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3554b34b/a2t.imghttp://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techradar/software-news/~4/OMSfQHHqLBg

http://cdn.mos.techradar.com/art/mobile_phones/Nokia/Nokia_Normandy_colours_leak-470-75.jpgFirst it was on, then it was off, now we just don't know. The rumoured Nokia smartphone running Android has reportedly appeared online again, with its launch status still anyone's guess. The handset - codenamed Normandy - was may have become the first Nokia handset to adopt Google's operating system, word would have it, but Microsoft's purchase of Nokia appeared to kill the prospects. Regardless of whether it's coming or not, it hasn't stopped that prolific Twitter leak artist @evleaks from giving the world another look at what the handset might look like, if it ever graced us with its presence. The purported press render is much like previous leaks, only this time it appears in a range of colours including lime green, while, yellow, red, blue and black. What might have beenJust last week reports claimed the handset had been shelved, largely due to Microsoft's recently announced stewardship of its big Windows Phone manufacturing partner. According to the report from Chinese blog CTech, the team experimenting with Android is now working on wireless charging tech instead; suggesting that might just be that. With a launch now somewhat of a long shot, the Nokia Normandy might just end up being one of those tech 'what might have been' stories. If Nokia had embraced Android three years ago then, most observers would say, it wouldn't have had to sell out to Microsoft in the first place, but sadly we'll never know. http://rss.feedsportal.com/c/669/f/415085/s/35275d0d/sc/21/mf.gifhttp://res3.feedsportal.com/social/twitter.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/facebook.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/linkedin.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/googleplus.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/email.png http://da.feedsportal.com/r/184842140312/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/35275d0d/sc/21/rc/1/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/184842140312/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/35275d0d/sc/21/rc/2/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/184842140312/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/35275d0d/sc/21/rc/3/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/184842140312/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/35275d0d/a2.imghttp://pi.feedsportal.com/r/184842140312/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/35275d0d/a2t.imghttp://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techradar/software-news/~4/020i52Hd7i8

http://cdn.mos.techradar.com/art/events/WINDOWS%20PHONE%208/Microsoft%20Office%20Announcement/Microsoft-365-SkyDrive-Demo-470-75.jpgMicrosoft has offered a little festive treat for Windows Phone users by offering 20GB of bonus SkyDrive storage for an entire year. The offer, which runs until the end of January, was publicised to Windows Phone owners via email this weekend. Users can follow the link within the email to sign up. This adds to the 7GB of free storage Microsoft already gifts those using its mobile operating system, allowing them to safeguard files and photos on the cloud. Microsoft hasn't made clear what will happen at the end of that one year, but it's possible that the company will start asking you to pay for that 20GB once the promotion is over. More blips!These blips will always be free because we love you guys... Motorola cries Timber! as it launches wood-backed Moto XBeyonce's secret album puts other iTunes sales records to shameBreaking Bad spin-off Better Call Saul heading to Netflixhttp://rss.feedsportal.com/c/669/f/415085/s/3514cc66/sc/5/mf.gifhttp://res3.feedsportal.com/social/twitter.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/facebook.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/linkedin.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/googleplus.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/email.png http://da.feedsportal.com/r/184841990988/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3514cc66/sc/5/rc/1/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/184841990988/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3514cc66/sc/5/rc/2/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/184841990988/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3514cc66/sc/5/rc/3/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/184841990988/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3514cc66/a2.imghttp://pi.feedsportal.com/r/184841990988/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3514cc66/a2t.imghttp://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techradar/software-news/~4/VdmzAz0pfHA

http://cdn.mos.techradar.com/art/software/Twitter/Vine/vine_windowsphone_official-470-75.jpgVine has announced it is graduating from the mobile-only appverse, with web profiles coming soon for all users. Previously the six-second video montages could only be viewed through the mobile app, through permalinks posted on Facebook and Twitter or shared via email. The Twitter-owned service is now inviting users to sign up for their personalised vanity URLs at the Vine.co website, which has, until now, been holding page for the iOS, Android and Windows Phone apps. The announcement follows Instagram's launch of web profiles last year, which allowed users to browse the full image and video libraries of folks they follow, just as they could on the mobile app. Uploads unlikelyThe Vine roll out is likely to follow a similar format with no capacity for users to upload their videos through the web portal itself. No word yet on when Vine will roll out the web profiles, but sometime early in the new year seems probable. Vine beats Instagram to Windows Phonehttp://rss.feedsportal.com/c/669/f/415085/s/3514c072/sc/21/mf.gifhttp://res3.feedsportal.com/social/twitter.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/facebook.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/linkedin.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/googleplus.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/email.png http://da.feedsportal.com/r/184841988610/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3514c072/sc/21/rc/1/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/184841988610/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3514c072/sc/21/rc/2/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/184841988610/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3514c072/sc/21/rc/3/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/184841988610/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3514c072/a2.imghttp://pi.feedsportal.com/r/184841988610/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3514c072/a2t.imghttp://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techradar/software-news/~4/snU9kgYvVDM

http://cdn.mos.techradar.com/art/features/Windows%20XP%20tips%20and%20tricks%20062013/WXP110_f_custom_background-470-75.jpgOrganisations have only four more months to move from Windows XP before Microsoft stops supporting the venerable operating system. It is also common practice for systems administrators to delay adoption of new operationg systems until the first service pack, but with Windows 8.1 out of the door, there has never been a better time or a more pressing need to migrate to Microsoft's latest OS. Organisations can't afford to be one, two or three Oss behind. It is time to bite the bullet and embrace Windows 8. But it is important to make a few decisions when migrating to the new OS. 32-bit or 64?If you have legacy desktops and applications, you may find that installing a 64-bit OS not suitable for your needs. You may have to stick with 32-bit if there are no available 64-bit drivers for old hardware and applications. But 64-bit has its plus points. The biggest of these is memory. The 64-bit version of Windows 8 can support more than 3GB of memory. Future applications may have large memory requirements that better suit 64-bit environments. Hardware requirements If you are upgrading to Windows 8 there are a few minimum requirements as far as hardware is concerned. These are 1GHz or faster processor1GB RAM (32-bit) or 2GB RAM (64-bit)16GB available hard-disk space (32-bit) or 20GB (64-bit)DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driverIn addition, Microsoft says that Metro style applications have a minimum of 1,024x768 screen resolution, and 1,366x768 for the snap feature. Migrating user dataMigration tools can take the strain of updating lots of desktops by transferring operating systems and application settings and even apps and drivers from the old OS to the new one. This will save the user time in not having to set up their applications again in the way they had them pre-upgrade. Upgrade or fresh install?When moving to a new operating system, there are two ways of going about this: Upgrade an existing system or start afresh with new hardware. If you are running Windows XP, then you may find the requirements a little beyond what that PC would have, upgrading the hardware may be required before an upgrade. Upgrading the OS will allow you to transfer user and application settings in certain circumstances. With Windows 7 PCs, an in-place upgrade can be carried out that allows the user retain all files, settings and compatible applications. With Vista, if Service Pack 1 is installed, personal files and system settings are kepts, but applications will have to be re-installed. For Windows XP users, upgrading is possible without a fresh install if Service Pack 3 is installed, but only personal files will be kept. A fresh or "clean" install can be done if no settings are to be transferred or the machine itself is completely new. Test applicationsApplications built for previous operating systems may not work so well in Windows 8 (if at all). So it is best to test the operating yourself with various apps that the organisation uses to make sure that critical business application still runs. Those that don't can then be flagged for vendor support to see if an updated version is in the works. http://rss.feedsportal.com/c/669/f/415085/s/350342aa/sc/4/mf.gifhttp://res3.feedsportal.com/social/twitter.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/facebook.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/linkedin.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/googleplus.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/email.png http://da.feedsportal.com/r/184841877951/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/350342aa/sc/4/rc/1/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/184841877951/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/350342aa/sc/4/rc/2/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/184841877951/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/350342aa/sc/4/rc/3/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/184841877951/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/350342aa/a2.imghttp://pi.feedsportal.com/r/184841877951/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/350342aa/a2t.imghttp://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techradar/software-news/~4/vC29OCe5GkA

http://cdn.mos.techradar.com/art/features/Windows%20XP%20tips%20and%20tricks%20062013/laptop%20with%20XP-470-75.jpgSpiceworks have announced today the results of a report, aimed at addressing issues facing IT professionals as the Windows XP end-of-life (EOL) deadline draws near. The study, entitled "Getting Over Your XP" (link opens a PDF), revealed just how prevalent the operating system remains 12 years after its release. According to the survey, 76 per cent of IT professionals run Windows XP on devices within their place network. Of that number, 36 per cent will leave XP as the operating system after its end-of-life occurs. This means that when Windows cease to provide security updates, patches and bulletins for the operating system, 27 per cent of professionals will continue to use it. Reluctance to upgrade will increase the risk of malicious attack. Lack of budgetAn upgrade to Windows 7 appears to be the favoured course of action. 96 per cent of those asked said they ran it, or would run it, on their network. This is compared to 42 per cent running Windows 8 or 8.1 and 30 per cent running Apple's OS X. 48 per cent of those asked who still had XP said they planned to decommission their devices and purchase Windows 7 machines. Three quarters of those asked pointed to "maintaining a similar user experience" as their primary reason for upgrading to Windows 7, not Windows 8 or 8.1. Why do so many still use Windows XP? Lack of budget, time and resources were stated by professionals as the main reasons why an upgrade from XP hasn't occurred on their networks yet. 55 per cent cited a lack of budget, 39 per cent a lack of time to do so and 31 per cent a lack of resources. The survey was conducted in October 2013 and had more than 1300 respondents. A majority of those asked were in North America and comprised a variety of industries including healthcare, education, finance and government. TechRadar goes over what you need to know about upgrading from XPhttp://rss.feedsportal.com/c/669/f/415085/s/34f7dcac/sc/4/mf.gifhttp://res3.feedsportal.com/social/twitter.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/facebook.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/linkedin.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/googleplus.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/email.png http://da.feedsportal.com/r/184841776492/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34f7dcac/sc/4/rc/1/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/184841776492/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34f7dcac/sc/4/rc/2/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/184841776492/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34f7dcac/sc/4/rc/3/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/184841776492/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34f7dcac/a2.imghttp://pi.feedsportal.com/r/184841776492/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34f7dcac/a2t.imghttp://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techradar/software-news/~4/PRAfCspqcDE

http://cdn.mos.techradar.com/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20177/LXF177.iview.2-470-75.jpgGoogle has just celebrated its 15th birthday, and much of its success is thanks to Linux and open source software. This gave us the perfect excuse for our sister magazine Linux Format to ask Google's Chris DiBona, about how open source has changed Google, and how Google has changed open source. Sadly, he couldn't comment on the KitKat name for Android 4.4. Linux Format: After nine years at Google, including the launch of Android, what's changed for you? Chris DiBona: Ah, well, when I got to Google, it was 1,800 people, and now we're topping 44,000. As you grow like that, everything grows, right? You get more developers who want to use more source code, you get more repositories, because nine years ago we didn't have that many to worry about. Now I have to worry about all of them. We didn't have Android or Chrome when I started, and it's been difficult to kick off those projects in a way that's consistent with the goals of the project and open source. Think about Android alone. It tops 400 Git repositories, and so we had to write all this new tooling that's all open source as well, such as Repo [Android's repository management tool] and Gerritt [a web-based code review system]. And then Git itself wasn't working for us anymore because it wasn't scaling when we'd have an operating system release. So we ended up hiring most of the Git team - there's like only one or two core committers now for Git who don't work at Google, and that's keeping Git running on our back-ends, but also keeping the clients out there up to date and everything working. So now, for instance, there's a Google team that maintains what you think of as Git in Debian. And that ensures that when a Debian, Mac or Windows user uses Git to pull Android - or to pull really any of our Git-based projects - that they're using the most recent version of Git. It's fairly complex, the way all the things weave together now. LXF: What was originally envisaged as your role at Google? Did Google think 'We're going to have 100 open source projects and we need someone to manage them?' CDB: If it were just 100 that would be one thing. I think technically, I've released a little over 3,700 projects since I started - large and small, mostly small obviously. For every Android there's a thousand smaller projects. Little tools that find their ways out there and patches galore. So when they hired me, they just knew they needed somebody who would care about this stuff professionally to come in and sort of keep things on an even keel. LXF: How do you manage the open source compliance in a project such as Android? CDB: I don't run Android but I do help them. For Android we were very lucky in that we were able to really make compliance part of the tooling and part of the build system early. LXF: Years ahead of its release? CDB: Yeah, about three years ahead. We worked with the Android team and we actually provide infrastructure for the Android team worldwide, as well as all the Android partners and the rest. We're able not just to say to them, 'Hey! You should be in compliance!' Because it's kind of not enough. We're able to say, 'Here's how you can stand in compliance.' And in fact, we're at the point where if you're shipping an Android device, even if you have no contact with Google whatsoever, and no real desire to even care, it is actually work to come out of compliance with Android because it will fill in the 'About' boxes for you, it will do a lot of things for you that the open source licences demand of you. So when you see an Android device that's out of compliance - I mean literally letter of the law out of compliance - it can be rare. Even if somebody is completely and wholly ignorant of what open source licences require. And in some ways that's the best case, right? Even in a company like Google where we have staff in place, as new repositories are created, as new projects are started - we're not always pretty. We have to be extremely up to date on what the company is doing, so that we can make sure that when it comes to the time to launch a product that they're able to do so in compliance with open source licences and, frankly, using the most up-to-date versions of open source software - they can be up to date on bugfixes and that sort of thing. We try to get in early, so that we're not seen as a barrier to launch because if we're slowing down launches, we're failing in a company like Google, and we don't want to be that group. http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20177/LXF177.iview.3-420-90.jpg LXF: Is that kind of compliance in the DNA of people that work at Google? CDB: Yes and no. You have to realise that open source licences can be extremely complex. You don't necessarily want engineers to become experts at licences, because if they're doing that sometimes they're not developing quickly because they're worrying too much about these interactions. We try to give them broad guidelines and smart tooling so they know the implications of that which they're building. We try not to have them become experts in licensing because it's a scale just like any other: if you're good at this do you have the capacity to be good at this other thing too? Maybe, but I'd rather have them concentrate solely on product development and all the rest. LXF: Has Google's approach to open source changed over those nine years? CDB: Sure. It's funny because depending on the project, they have different perspectives on open source. LXF: So ChromeOS has a different perspective than Android? CDB: I'd say so, yeah. I mean ChromeOS is a different approach to operating system development than Android. It's funny because if you're going to ship a browser, for instance, there are certain plugins that you want to make more secure, but those plugins are by their nature closed source - things like Flash. If you want a ChromeOS box to render Flash content and do it in a secure way, well, we had to cut a special deal with Adobe that would allow us to ship that version of Flash in that way. And that's something that doesn't show up in Chromium or ChromiumOS, right? It just shows up in ChromeOS. And so you have these funny borderlands between open source and proprietary software and how does that work? Similarly, if you want to cut a deal with one of the content producers in the USA, in Europe and the rest, they want to know that they have that whole "secure path" and to ensure that you have to make sure that the deal does not interact poorly with the open source licences in an operating system or program. That can be extremely tricky. On top of that is our standards work. We have one part of the company that is advocating for encrypted media extensions, for instance, so that they can ship Netflix players and that kind of thing, and then you also have Ian Hickson, who works for me, saying that that doesn't belong in the Web WG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) specification for HTML 5. LXF: So who makes the decision? CDB: This is the interesting thing about a company like Google. We can have both. Or we can have neither, depending on your perspective. We will sometimes have things that look conflicting, but they're not really. There's nothing wrong with us wanting the Web WG HTML 5 specification to be a pure document that doesn't depend on patent-laden technologies, like you'd find in some specifications, and also have an ancillary specification that adds to HTML 5 that allows for it. You can drive yourself crazy. LXF: Are you allowed to have an opinion on these kind of subjects, or do you remain objective? CDB: I always let one thing guide my actions and to date that's served me well. And it's this: I don't care, OK, if I like a project, or what it does for a user, or if I'm the user of that project so long as they're in compliance with open source licences - in spirit and in letter - I'm fine. I don't have to like it so long as they're compliant - so long as they're not disrespecting my friends in open source software. As long as our colleagues in open source software are being served well, I don't have to like it, because I like being in compliance. I am that kind of regulator, and as long as that which I regulate is healthy, I'm happy. LXF: And that includes something as contentious as DRM in the HTML 5 specification? CDB: It's extremely contentious. What I end up doing more often than not in those cases is ensuring, as much as I can, that the two teams treat each other nicely, you know don't call each other names, or whatever, and don't try to force the issue in unhealthy ways with each other. LXF: And as long as they're both in compliance, you're happy? CDB: As long as they're both in compliance, we're happy. That's actually never been a problem. They all know that that's something that's important too, so that's never really been a problem. The trick is when people are working on conflicting or competitive projects with each other; it's very difficult to keep them from turning that into a personal problem. As an engineering manager this is something that's true. LXF: What if there's a philosophical difference? CDB: It's funny because people say 'Oh, it's just software, you shouldn't worry about it'. Or 'It's just business, you shouldn't worry about it'. But what people seem to forget is that software and business are personal. It's how we get through our day. It's an important part of our lives so trying to keep things in perspective is really important. Now, you could say 'Does that make you a sellout Chris?' But I don't feel it does because given that the overall actions of the company have been, in my opinion, really strong and on the side of the angels, I think it's OK for us to have these discussions, especially internally. LXF: What do you spend most of your time working on now? CDB: I have a team of about 30 or so people working for me, and that's on various aspects of compliance and the Summer of Code, as well as tooling and infrastructure. I end up doing people management. Acquisitions compliance takes up a fair bit of time. When you have as many engineers as we do, and you have as many programme managers as we do, and project managers; people inside the company have to care about their careers and make sure that they're happy at a company like Google. So looking after promotions and calibration is something I think is really important, but not as exciting for your readers. http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20177/LXF177.iview.1-420-90.jpg LXF: Do you get to influence policy? CDB: Yes and no. I mean, I'm a director in the company. That means I'm not in charge. Larry is in charge, and then we have a bunch of people who are way more senior than I am. But I'm able to help out in a lot of ways, help people find their way careers and that's actually really rewarding. LXF: What do you think has been Google's biggest contribution to open source? CDB: I think that the three biggest projects we've released are Android, Chromium and Go. If you asked me ten years from now which one I'm proudest of, I'm going to have a hard time answering, because Android has had incredible impact. LXF: There's Summer of Code as well! CDB: Well, Summer of Code is a very personal thing that's affected thousands of people. Android and Chromium have affected millions, or even a billion people. But from my nerd heart, my programmer's soul, I look at things like Summer of Code; and I look at things like Go; and I look at things like even GCI, our High School programme. I think these things are what makes open source persist in ways that even Android and Chromium do and don't. Chromium and Android are market forces at this point. LXF: They are the proof that open source is legitimate? CDB: They're fundamental. Beyond legitimacy. There have always been people over the last 20 years who've said open source is a cancer, or not legitimate, or the enemy. They say things like this and that always sort of misses the point for me, because open source is everywhere, right. And if we want it to continue to be everywhere and continue to help computer science move forward, we have to continue making it and keep it fundamental. The way we do that is through languages and through platforms like Android. By improving established open platforms like the web through things like Chromium. You have to realise that before Chrome launched, people were still launching browsers where one tab could bring down the whole OS. That's really hard to do now. That's considered silly. And where JavaScript performance didn't really matter. We were able to change that with Chrome in a way that users obviously found useful. But it also forced people who are working off of WebKit and Gecko to take another look at performance and security. If we hadn't done that, the web would be in a much worse state right now because there's a lot of malware around the web; there are a lot of people looking to trick you on the web. But because of Chromium, we focussed on this stuff early enough that it saved - in my mind - what the web could be. Can you imagine if you didn't have the malware protection and the process isolation of Chrome, that Chrome brought to other browsers? Can you imagine surfing the web the way it is right now? It's pretty grim. There's a lot of malware. You end up basically funnelling people into fewer and fewer sites, and therefore fewer and fewer viewpoints and all the rest. LXF: Do you think Google would have existed without open source or without Linux? CDB: Probably. But I don't think the web would exist without open source and Linux. So there would have been no Google. It would have been something different, but without open source driving the internet there would have been no internet for Google to crawl, much less to run ads against, and much less to enforce our ideas around Android and Chromium. I think they're one and the same. LXF: Of Summer of Code's 1,200 students and 60 countries, 271 students have been/ are in India. Do you think the next ten years is going to see a shift in where and how technical innovation originates? CDB: I hope so. Every year that goes by we see more people from outside of the US take part. The US still has a healthy proportion - 250 or something - but it's amazing to see where people pop up - like Sri Lanka. Even during the civil war we still had Tamil and other Sri Lankan students taking part in the Summer of Code; it's like, how did it transcend borders in that way in that country? And so, Sri Lanka has always been really interesting to us in ways that even India and China are not. Here's basically a very small nation, and if you look at it, there's a couple of universities that really glommed onto Summer of Code as a way of expanding their curriculum. Think about that. 79 Computer Science students in a small university in a small country in the midst of a civil war, all doing remarkable work. This is the promise of the internet and computer science made flesh. LXF: Is that how you'd imagined Summer of Code to be? CDB: Not really. I don't want to portray myself as like a visionary. I never saw Summer of Code like that. I saw Summer of Code as a way that we could bring new people into open source. People we never would have seen before, because we were literally financing students so that they wouldn't have to go home and do something random that isn't Computer Science over the summer. So for me it was just a way of keeping computer scientists engaged for the summer and, hopefully, on open source. And it turned into something much more than that. Something more revolutionary than that in my opinion, and that's really a testament to the open source teams that have shown up and mentored, and all the rest. Remember, for every open source developer in the Summer of Code, there's a mentor and a project. Without the mentors, it wouldn't work. The only thing Summer of Code does, that's revolutionary… is it pairs up an experienced open source developer who's used to working remotely with other people with a neophyte developer. That's the remarkable thing because in the end that student can always go to their mentor and they can say, 'I'm having a problem.' Or the mentor can watch the incoming change list and say, "You're having a problem. If you do this and this, you're be doing good. If you do this and this, you're going to be doing bad." You don't even get that in most jobs! Now why not read Google at 15: from the garage to Glasshttp://rss.feedsportal.com/c/669/f/415085/s/34f55ddf/sc/4/mf.gifhttp://res3.feedsportal.com/social/twitter.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/facebook.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/linkedin.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/googleplus.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/email.png http://da.feedsportal.com/r/184841770751/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34f55ddf/sc/4/rc/1/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/184841770751/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34f55ddf/sc/4/rc/2/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/184841770751/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34f55ddf/sc/4/rc/3/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/184841770751/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34f55ddf/a2.imghttp://pi.feedsportal.com/r/184841770751/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34f55ddf/a2t.imghttp://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techradar/software-news/~4/OLCXMmtOn-Q

http://cdn.mos.techradar.com/art/software/Valve/SteamOS/2013%20Beta/Early%20Look/_DSC3273-470-75.jpgAfter so many teasers and chest beating press announcements, the gaming public is finally getting its first look at what will tick inside Steam Machines with the December 13 release of SteamOS. While the software beta is open to eager users, Valve clearly stated that system install would "erase everything" on people's machine. Throwing caution to the wind, we trudged through all the installation bumps to get an early look at what Steam's dedicated OS can offer. Our first impressions of the SteamOS, once successfully installed after a series of hurdles, was that it looked an awful lot like the Big Picture Mode already available on Windows PCs, Macs, and even other Linux machines. Through and through it's the same exact blown up, controller-friendly version of Steam made for couch gamers and their big screen HDTVs. The interface becomes even more immediately familiar when plugging in an Xbox 360 controller we had lying around. http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/software/Valve/SteamOS/2013%20Beta/Early%20Look/_DSC3257-420-100.jpg The overall experience is identical until you tab over to the library to realize only a small segment of games are available for play on Linux. Out of Steam's massive digital library there are only 270 games playable on the new open OS platform. http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/software/Valve/SteamOS/2013%20Beta/Early%20Look/_DSC3266-420-100.jpg Despite the smaller library we were able to play a good handful of games from new popular indie titles like Starbound to the graphics intensive Metro: Last Light. Even without going out of our way to install the latest drivers we were able to max out particle effects and dynamic shadows without any noticeable hiccups even when compared to running on a Windows computer. http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/software/Valve/SteamOS/2013%20Beta/Early%20Look/SteamOS%20Last%20Light-420-100.jpg Using Linux with SteamOSGetting to anything outside of the Steam ecosystem requires a little more effort. For one thing, users will actually have to go to their Steam interface settings to switch on access to the Linux desktop. http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/software/Valve/SteamOS/2013%20Beta/Early%20Look/_DSC3270-420-100.jpg What's more, the SteamOS does not come with a normal Steam client, and users are locked into Big Picture Mode or will have to quit out of the application all together. This may be as designed as a way to keep its users locked in the interface, but may also be a tick of the beta that will be remedied in future iterations. http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/software/Valve/SteamOS/2013%20Beta/Early%20Look/SteamOS%20Desktop-420-100.jpg From a hardcore Linux user's perspective, SteamOS is both a pleasure and a frustration. It's great to finally see Linux openly running on something. It's been too long in the shadows, stealing server market share slowly to dominate, but not breaking upwards of 10% of the desktop market. On the other hand, this is a seriously stripped-down version of the Debian 7.1 ("wheezy") distribution, so much so that there's really not a lot to do without editing much of the configuration. http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/software/Valve/SteamOS/2013%20Beta/Early%20Look/_DSC3360-420-100.jpg We tested what we could install on SteamOS to build it into a true Debian Linux desktop with Valve's kernel and GPU customizations. With that in mind, the first thing we did was try to install Shutter, a simple screenshot app as Debian's default print-screen that did not work inside of Big Picture Mode. The install failed as Shutter was not found in the Linux's app repositories. Similar to the Mac App store, Linux can access a directory of applications with the slight difference in that everything is free. SteamOS, however is only able to access it's own repos. http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/software/Valve/SteamOS/2013%20Beta/Early%20Look/SteamOS%20Repo-420-100.jpg Our impression is that Valve doesn't want coding enthusiasts to come in and install newer (or older) versions of libraries and applications that have a fair chance of breaking its own programs. Make no mistake; this is not a Linux desktop with Steam installed. This is a completely locked-down and customized installation of Linux designed to do one thing; run the Steam engine. http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/software/Valve/SteamOS/2013%20Beta/Early%20Look/_DSC3334-420-100.jpg After tinkering in the operating system's underlying terminal code base, we forced the system to install Shutter by adding Debian's main repos. Upon doing so we realized that we'd break some applications by altering dependencies which in turn would break a facet of networking - not a good thing to do in a custom environment. In some of our tests we found ourselves blocked from installing other applications specifically designed for Debian such as Chrome and even the open source Gimp image editing software. http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/software/Valve/SteamOS/2013%20Beta/Early%20Look/_DSC3272-420-100.jpg As an extremely basic Linux system, SteamOS includes the aforementioned terminal app, a Firefox clone called Iceweasel, and a few other utility applications. Meanwhile, Valve has stated support for Netflix and other entertainment are forthcoming. Installing SteamOSIn general building a "Steam Machine" with Linux and Big Picture Mode would be a lot easier by simply installing Debian (or Ubuntu, or CentOS, or Arch, or any number of Linux distros) and then installing the Steam client on top. All go without the risk of bricking your machine or erasing all the data on your hard disk drives. http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/software/Valve/SteamOS/2013%20Beta/Early%20Look/_DSC3304-420-100.jpg The installation process itself meanwhile is not for the faint of heart. For our own system we tested SteamOS on a relatively popular and recent PC setup with decent driver support even on Linux; pairing an Intel Core i5 3750K processor with a Nvidia GeForce GTX 670 graphics card. http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/software/Valve/SteamOS/2013%20Beta/Early%20Look/_DSC3327-420-100.jpg The method that worked best for us was going with the custom installation, which we recommend extracting directly to a FAT32 formatted thumbdrive rather than copying and pasting files. Towards the middle of the process we also had to locate the Steam executable in Linux's file system to get it up and running. Also, be prepared to see lots of scary looking code. http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/software/Valve/SteamOS/2013%20Beta/Early%20Look/_DSC3346-420-100.jpg Very early verdict All in all, our conclusion is SteamOS shouldn't interest anyone without a completely spare machine that they can dedicate to SteamOS (as Valve intends) and not run anything else. Users for the most part would be better off just installing their own Linux flavor of choice and using the Steam client. http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/software/Valve/SteamOS/2013%20Beta/Early%20Look/_DSC3256-420-100.jpg Valve may have released what is really an ultra beta to the Linux world, as it will appease the die-hard Linux folks or as a way to satiate those who aren't part of the lucky 300 Steam Machine owners. But for now, SteamOS is a task for the diehard tinkerers that love to potentially break things. Unless you can sudo command and can vi with the best of them, wait for the console to come out. We're in for plenty more Steam Machines and SteamOS at CES 2014. http://rss.feedsportal.com/c/669/f/415085/s/34e0dac5/sc/4/mf.gifhttp://res3.feedsportal.com/social/twitter.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/facebook.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/linkedin.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/googleplus.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/email.png http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180266325648/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34e0dac5/sc/4/rc/1/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180266325648/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34e0dac5/sc/4/rc/2/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180266325648/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34e0dac5/sc/4/rc/3/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180266325648/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34e0dac5/a2.imghttp://pi.feedsportal.com/r/180266325648/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34e0dac5/a2t.imghttp://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techradar/software-news/~4/_3uxiqseFHI

http://cdn.mos.techradar.com/art/software/SlingPlayer/SlingPlayer_for_Windows%208-470-75.jpgSanta Claus may not be due to slide down the chimney for another 12 days, but the elves at Slingbox are bringing a little holiday cheer to PC and tablet users on the Windows platform. Sling Media announced today the release of SlingPlayer for Windows 8, a native media player app first announced last month and now available for PC users running Microsoft's latest and greatest operating system. Available globally from the Windows 8 Store, the SlingPlayer app offers a unified experience across all Windows 8 devices, including laptop or desktop computers, convertibles and tablets. Although Intel-powered Windows 8.1 devices could previously access Sling's web-based player, the Windows 8 app delivers support for ARM-based Windows RT devices like Surface 2 and the Nokia Lumia 2520. Sling it, touch itSlingPlayer for Windows 8 app works equally well with a mouse or fingers, thanks to the touch-enabled user interface that offers universal support for all devices. The app also includes an intuitive gallery view in keeping with the look and feel of other Windows 8 apps for easy discovery and navigation of live or recorded programs. Should you need another incentive to upgrade to Windows 8.1, the SlingPlayer native app is as good as any, since it requires the latest version. SlingPlayer for Windows 8 offers a free 24-hour test drive and is priced comparable to other versions at $14.99; a separate version is also available for Windows Phone 8 devices. No luck buying an Xbox One yet? Check out our extensive review instead!http://rss.feedsportal.com/c/669/f/415085/s/34ca5a84/sc/15/mf.gifhttp://res3.feedsportal.com/social/twitter.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/facebook.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/linkedin.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/googleplus.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/email.png http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180266166135/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34ca5a84/sc/15/rc/1/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180266166135/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34ca5a84/sc/15/rc/2/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180266166135/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34ca5a84/sc/15/rc/3/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180266166135/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34ca5a84/a2.imghttp://pi.feedsportal.com/r/180266166135/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34ca5a84/a2t.imghttp://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techradar/software-news/~4/c2yQhg9HrEk

http://cdn.mos.techradar.com/art/TRBC/Abstract/Handshake/iStock_000002304477Small-ene-470-75.jpgCisco Systems Inc. has lost a court bid in the European Union General Court – the second highest in the region – to overturn approval of Microsoft's 2011 takeover of Skype Technologies. Cisco is one of the largest makers of networking equipment in the world, holding a large share in the enterprise communications market. It argued that the combination of Microsoft and Skype gave the two companies 80 to 90 per cent of the market for video calling on Windows-based computers. According to the EU General Court, Cisco "failed to demonstrate" that the EU was wrong to find the Microsoft-Skype merger in line with the bloc's internal market. The merger, the court ruled, "does not restrict competition" in the video communications market for consumers and businesses. Flawed ReasoningIn October 2011 Microsoft won unconditional approval from the commission to buy the world's most popular international calling service, Skype, for $8.5 billion (£5.1 billion, AU$9.3 billion). A third of the world's voice calls are now made on Skype, with more than 280 million users spending more than 100 minutes monthly. Regulators from the EU judged that the deal would not harm any competition in the region because the competition was continually growing. It added that the merger faced "numerous players" in the communications market, including Google and Cisco itself. Cisco told the court during a hearing in May that the deal shouldn't have been allowed so quickly. This was due to the fact that the EU couldn't conclude beyond reasonable doubt (without an in-depth examination) in the original hearing that the transaction posed no problems for competition. In its appeal Cisco argued that the EU regulator, based in Brussels, used "flawed reasoning" that conflicted with how it had approached previous cases. It will not, however, appeal to the EU Court of Justice, Europe's highest court. A Microsoft spokesman in Brussels, Robin Koch, welcomed the court's decision. Skype: We've injected life into Microsofthttp://rss.feedsportal.com/c/669/f/415085/s/34bf2ed5/sc/21/mf.gifhttp://res3.feedsportal.com/social/twitter.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/facebook.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/linkedin.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/googleplus.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/email.png http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180266087950/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34bf2ed5/sc/21/rc/1/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180266087950/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34bf2ed5/sc/21/rc/2/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180266087950/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34bf2ed5/sc/21/rc/3/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180266087950/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34bf2ed5/a2.imghttp://pi.feedsportal.com/r/180266087950/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34bf2ed5/a2t.imghttp://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techradar/software-news/~4/YeqjV8EGPQY

http://cdn.mos.techradar.com/art/software/IE/ie10-desktop-470-75.jpgMicrosoft posted last week that October 30 2014 would be the final day they would ship Windows 7 preinstalled. Now the company has backtracked, saying that they made a mistake and the correct status of the last sale date is "to be determined". On its site, two end-of-sale dates are listed for their operating systems: one for the software retailed by itself and one for PCs with the OS preinstalled on them. October 30 2013 was set for the retail software while the same date in 2014 was set for pre-installed PCs. This has since been changed to "to be determined" for both dates. In a statement, Microsoft said that the retail sales did actually end on October 30 this year and that "We have yet to determine the end of sales date for PCs with Windows 7 preinstalled. The October 2014 date that was posted to the Windows Lifecycle page globally last week was done so in error." Tight deadlinesIt remains to be seen how exactly the mistake occurred on the site; Microsoft has been sat on the fence when asked how long it will continue to sell Windows 7. Initially the company said that it had stopped shipping the OS to retailers before shifting that stance over the weekend to be "to be determined" again. Windows XP, whose end of life arrives in April, is still the operating system of choice in many businesses. Had Microsoft stuck with its October date for pre-installed systems, it would have left companies with a tight deadline to upgrade from XP. "When a version of Windows reaches its end of sales date" states the Microsoft website, "it's a good time to think about upgrading". Whatever the case may be, Microsoft will end extended support for Windows 7 in January 2020. The operating system is already no longer listed on the Microsoft Store website. Still using Windows 7? Here are some tips and trickshttp://rss.feedsportal.com/c/669/f/415085/s/34be1bbe/sc/15/mf.gifhttp://res3.feedsportal.com/social/twitter.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/facebook.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/linkedin.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/googleplus.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/email.png http://da.feedsportal.com/r/183026165094/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34be1bbe/sc/15/rc/1/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/183026165094/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34be1bbe/sc/15/rc/2/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/183026165094/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34be1bbe/sc/15/rc/3/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/183026165094/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34be1bbe/a2.imghttp://pi.feedsportal.com/r/183026165094/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34be1bbe/a2t.imghttp://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techradar/software-news/~4/YVhvsgUvm9I

http://cdn.mos.techradar.com/art/software/Windows/windows_logo-470-75.jpgMicrosoft's Windows 8 operating system has had a difficult journey since its launch. Steve Sinofsky predicted that the new OS would have a rocky start before consumers ultimately embraced it, but a year on from its release, it still pales in comparison to its far more popular predecessor, Windows 7. Now a chart from Statista (based on data from Net Applications) draws some stark writing on the wall for Windows 8, which was supposed to be the future of Microsoft's platform strategy. The new operating system is being used by only 9.3% of the computing market. In comparison, Windows 7, which launched in October 2009, was twice as popular 12 months after launch. Worrying for MicrosoftWindows 7 took only a few months to surpass 10% market share and reach 20% at the close of its first year. In comparison, Windows 8 has started slowly and continued to grow slowly, and, despite a small increase in sales over the summer, appears to have plateaued in recent months. It took the new platform more than half a year to reach just 5% adoption. Perhaps more worrying for Microsoft, however, is another report from Net Applications which gave Windows 8 a market growth of 0.05% while Windows 7's growth was a far bigger at 0.22%. Essentially, Windows 8 is actually being outsold by its 4-year old predecessor, despite Microsoft actively spreading the OS's 'look and feel' to other platforms such as the Xbox and Windows Phone. Of course, the numbers don't necessarily foretell the doom of Windows 8. Microsoft will be hoping that Christmas and holiday sales of devices supporting that platform will drive its market share up into more healthy figures. It seems, however, that Microsoft's user base overwhelmingly shown its preference for Windows 7, the company's tried-and-trusted stalwart. Find out what TechRadar thought about Windows 8http://rss.feedsportal.com/c/669/f/415085/s/34b2994d/sc/15/mf.gifhttp://res3.feedsportal.com/social/twitter.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/facebook.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/linkedin.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/googleplus.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/email.png http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180266178983/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34b2994d/sc/15/rc/1/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180266178983/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34b2994d/sc/15/rc/2/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180266178983/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34b2994d/sc/15/rc/3/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180266178983/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34b2994d/a2.imghttp://pi.feedsportal.com/r/180266178983/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34b2994d/a2t.imghttp://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techradar/software-news/~4/ucRaJSsGlBw

http://cdn.mos.techradar.com/art/software/Foxtel%20Play/Foxtel-Play-review8-470-75.jpgFoxtel has announced that its Foxtel Play service will now be available on a number of 2013 LG smart TV models. Foxtel Play doesn't require a lock-in contract or the need for a set-top box, as long as your compatible smart LG TV is hooked up to broadband internet. You can download the app starting today via LG's SmartWorld app store, and you can also check out if your LG TV model will be able to run the Foxtel Play app over on Foxtel's website. Play gets more playAlready available on Windows PCs, Macs, Samsung smart TVs and the Xbox 360, and now on close to 20 LG smart TVs, Foxtel Play is becoming much more accessible. It allows your subscription to span across a number of devices, while you also get access to the Foxtel Go app on iOS and Android. And as Foxtel Play launched less than 6 months ago, we strongly suspect it will slowly make its way onto other TVs, as well as potentially next-gen consoles – it's only a matter of time before it pops up on the Xbox One. But while it's cheaper than a straight Foxtel subscription, it's still pricey. The lowest spend per month would be $25, while a subscription to all available packages will cost $100 per month - on top of your regular internet bill. Check out our Foxtel Play review to see if it is a real IPTV contender.http://rss.feedsportal.com/c/669/f/415085/s/34a2510e/sc/15/mf.gifhttp://res3.feedsportal.com/social/twitter.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/facebook.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/linkedin.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/googleplus.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/email.png http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180265931736/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34a2510e/sc/15/rc/1/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180265931736/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34a2510e/sc/15/rc/2/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180265931736/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34a2510e/sc/15/rc/3/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180265931736/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34a2510e/a2.imghttp://pi.feedsportal.com/r/180265931736/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34a2510e/a2t.imghttp://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techradar/software-news/~4/93Hcyd_eXnk

http://cdn.mos.techradar.com/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20175/LXF175.rev_fedvskor.korora19-470-75.jpgAlthough Fedora 19 and Korora 19 are genetically identical, we admit it's a little unfair to pit these distros against each other. Fedora is more than an OS: it's an ecosystem and caters to a wide spectrum of users. On the other hand, Korora is just one branch of that ecosystem that has been pruned and cultivated to serve one section of Fedora users: the everyday desktop user. Fedora has always pitched itself to power users and developers who would appreciate the many enterprise-centric features in the distro that eventually make their way into the commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux distro. This release is no different. One of Fedora 19's aims is to facilitate creation of cloud infrastructures. For this purpose it includes the latest release of OpenStack, codenamed 'Grizzly' that lets users set up their own cloud infrastructure, similar to public clouds like Amazon EC2 as well as OpenShift Origin, Red Hat's own Platform-as-a- Service (PaaS) solution. Fedora's focus These and several other OS management tools are available only on the Fedora 19 DVD and not on the live editions. You will, however, find the qemu-based Boxes emulator in the Gnome Live CD. Although the tool works pretty much like VirtualBox it lacks some of the flexibility of the latter, yet offers advanced features, such as the ability to connect to a virtual machine via the Internet. Another key focus area of Fedora 19 is 3D printing. It includes software for creating 3D models and tools for generating and sending code to 3D printers. To assist software developers the distro includes a tool that provides language-specific templates and can even publish projects directly to GitHub. The redesigned Anaconda installer is Fedora's Achilles heel and, by extension, Korora's. The installer is a work in progress, and we weren't impressed by it. For starters, the interface has been tweaked but still lacks the consistency you'll find in other mainstream distribution installers. Also while Anaconda successfully picks up the other OSes and distros, it refuses to identify them. Furthermore, users can't install the bootloader to any location other than the Master Boot Record. On the upside, disks are now identified by their mount points. You can also create a user in the installer itself, and inexperienced users will appreciate the simplified procedure for creating a LVM-based filesystem. All said and done, the new Anaconda installer works best only for simple partition layouts, and isn't intuitive enough for more complex setups. If you are an existing Fedora user, you're better off using the new FedUp upgrade tool that was introduced with Fedora 18. FedUp is a dracut and systemd process that is simple to use. In a couple of commands, it will update the repositories to point to the new release, download all the packages required and reboot to install them. On the desktop both Fedora 19 and Korora 19 use Gnome 3.8, which has a new privacy settings option and a new Clock app. After installation, you can opt to use Classic mode for a Gnome 2-style experience which is built with a collection of Gnome Shell extensions. http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20175/LXF175.rev_fedvskor.classic_gnome-420-90.jpg The release also features three major changes in the Activities overview. First, the overview is tabbed and by default opens the new frequently used tab. Second, it lists Utilities and Sundry with a darker background than the other apps. These aren't apps and instead launch sub-menus that list the apps in their respective groups. Finally, the search in the overview has been overhauled. In addition to matching the search string with installed apps, it now also displays results from individual Gnome apps. When you first log into your account, you get to choose your locale and configure the Wi-Fi connection and set up any online accounts. You're then shown a full-screen video to help you get started with Gnome. When it ends you are dropped to the desktop with the Gnome Help open which besides the textual help also has three additional videos that show you how to launch apps, switch tasks, and respond to messages using the Message Tray. The Gnome Online Accounts app can now connect to your Google, Facebook, Windows Live, Microsoft Exchange account as well as an ownCloud server. In addition to Gnome Online Accounts, Korora 19 also includes the ownCloud desktop client. While Fedora 19, like always, has opted to implement a stock Gnome Shell, Korora 19 has tweaked it somewhat to make it more user friendly. So unlike Fedora 19 which has a very bland desktop with no icons, you get the ability to place icons on the desktop in Korora 19. Then there's Gnome's Nautilus file manager, now known as Files. Under Fedora, it uses the Sushi file pre-viewer and has a very limited right-click context menu. However, in Korora 19 Files uses the gloobus-preview which renders previews faster than Sushi and features a meatier context menu that's hooked up to Deja Dup backup tool. Also, the user menu in Korora 19 displays the Suspend option along with the Power Off option and ships with the Gnome Tweak Tool for modifying the advanced settings in Gnome 3. Due to these tweaks, Korora 19 presents a more usable desktop than Fedora 19. If you're looking for drivers for your fancy graphics card or codecs to play patent-encumbered files in Fedora 19, you're barking up the wrong tree. Fedora by design avoids bundling any proprietary or non-FOSS component. So along with LibreOffice, Firefox, Shotwell, Rhythmbox, and Totem video player you get the satisfaction of running a libre desktop. But if you lack the morals of a free software purist, that is to say you are a regular desktop user, Korora 19 is designed for you. It has full multimedia support which includes equipping Firefox with plugins to play Flash and Java content along with the VLC media player, and the Jockey device manager to handle proprietary drivers. The applications http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20175/LXF175.rev_fedvskor.fedora19-420-90.jpg Unlike Fedora 19's live ISO for the Gnome desktop which weighs in at 919MB, Korora 19 Gnome ISO is 1.8GB. The distro uses the extra space to pack in popular apps for every desktop task imaginable. Firefox has the Adblock plugin and the DownloadThemAll download manager. There's also Audacity audio editor, OpenShot video editor, Handbrake video transcoder, GIMP image editor, RawTherapee for processing RAW images, Gwibber microblogging client, Liferea news aggregator and more. Now remember that all this software can be installed on a stock Fedora release as well, by installing repositories, such as RPMFusion. But you get them pre-installed with Korora along with custom repositories, such as Chrome, Adobe, and VirtualBox. Another key difference between Fedora 19 and Korora 19 are their package managers. Fedora 19 includes the software front-end to PackageKit, which lacks the functionality of Yum Extender that's in Korora 19. There's nothing stellar in the KDE version on Fedora 19 as well. You get the Konqueror browser instead of Firefox, Calligra Office instead of LibreOffice, and multimedia duties are handed to Amarok and Dragon Player. Korora's KDE edition also trumps Fedora's in terms of apps. Along with the Gnome editions ability to handle proprietary codecs and driver, it's got several KDE-specific apps, such as Dolphin and Krusader file managers, Choqok microblogging client, Kdenlive video editor and Kamoso webcam app. In the grand scheme of things, Fedora 19 is best suited as an Enterprise desktop, which doesn't care much for the proprietary codecs and the latest hardware drivers. If you've a fast Internet connection and the knowhow you can take a stock Fedora 19 release and turn it into Korora 19 in a couple of hours. Or you can save yourself the trouble and just download Korora 19. http://rss.feedsportal.com/c/669/f/415085/s/3491d921/sc/4/mf.gifhttp://res3.feedsportal.com/social/twitter.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/facebook.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/linkedin.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/googleplus.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/email.png http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180265816126/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3491d921/sc/4/rc/1/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180265816126/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3491d921/sc/4/rc/2/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180265816126/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3491d921/sc/4/rc/3/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180265816126/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3491d921/a2.imghttp://pi.feedsportal.com/r/180265816126/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3491d921/a2t.imghttp://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techradar/software-news/~4/RFa5mlXf1so

http://cdn.mos.techradar.com/art/internet/Microsoft/webapps/excel2-470-75.jpgOffice hasn't been just Word and Excel and PowerPoint for a long time. It's Exchange and SharePoint and Lync and Project and Dynamics, all now available as services in the cloud, as well as mobile apps that give you at least some of the features of desktop software. There's an iPad version of Office in development, once Surface gets a touch version of Office next year. Plus there are new services like Power BI, with its impressive natural language interface for digging into your company information. The way you get to all of that is Office 365, the subscription service, that so far, Microsoft is delighted with the popularity of the service with both businesses and consumers. "There are not a lot of examples of paid consumer subscriptions that have taken off really fast," points out Julia White. http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/internet/Microsoft/Skydrive/microsoft%20skydrive-420-90.jpg Office 365 Home and Premium has 2 million subscribers already – and they're using the cloud features rather than just treating it as a way to get the desktop Office software. "People are getting the differences," White told us. "They're using the Skype minutes, they're taking advantage of the service parts of it." Business subscriptions got a boost from the end of the fiscal year, a time when many enterprises buy IT services, which helped Office 365 be the fastest Microsoft business so far to reach its $1.5 billion run rate. Read our Office 2013 reviewAnd that's not just the government wins she was expecting (she mentions the State of New York and the city of San Jose, noting it's "right in the heart of silicon valley" and so a prime target for Google Apps), but British Airways and "a really healthy number" of financial services companies; a much harder target to win over. "You'd think those would be the last people to go because they have a lot of money, and they're very constrained by security and privacy. Government [sites] are so cash strapped I thought they have to [go cloud] but seeing so many financial services go to Office 365, I think that's a good indicator of general cloud adoption." New features, more oftenOffice 365 adoption is also helping to sell subscriptions to the Office 2013 desktop software, as Office 365 Pro Pus. "They realize that if I don't have a client that's also staying current, then I'm not going to realize the benefits of having the latest server versions in Office 365. Before, we were lucky if people were on the latest version of the on-premise products. Now, it's all deployed it was meant to be. We used to ship people the pieces of the car and they had to build it themselves. Now we just give them the car." Getting the latest version of Office 365 was a more drawn-out process than some users expected this year, because of the major architectural differences between Office 2010 and Office 2013. White says that kind of delay is "a thing of the past" and new features will arrive more quickly. For example, it will only take a month to make Yammer integration in the Office 365 admin portal available to all Office 365 users. http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/internet/Microsoft/webapps/powerpoint-420-100.jpg "Up to this release, we were still on a path where the engineering team was planning and building an on premise release and then we would deploy that to cloud infrastructure. Now we have redone the way we organize our engineering team and also the cadence of engineering release cycles. We have blown up the old planning and engineering release cycle, the three year thing making big monolithic changes. "There will never be any big platform level upgrade where it takes 18 months before people get the new stuff. For the cloud model that doesn't' work, now it's a constant steady cadence of stuff coming out. It's going to be more bite size chunks that come out, there's no big mega-release; everything from the new dirsync tools to the SkyDrive Pro storage increase to new Office mobile apps." All these new features can't come at the expense of quality, but you have to think about that differently for a service. "In the old days, the on premise design principle of engineering and the measure of quality was mean time to failure; how long could your code run until it failed. "The longer your code could run, the higher the quality. With a service it's very much about mean time to recovery. It's not about if something fails every year. It's if it takes you down for three days, it's a huge deal but if it if it fails every year and auto recovers in a nanosecond… that is a very different way to think about it, to engineer it, to measure your success. It's not so much about it never failing but that it has to be self-healing. That's been a big mental model change for the engineering team." One Office 365Office 365 has done its own mini version of the 'one Microsoft' reorg. "No longer is there a standalone Exchange, a standalone SharePoint and a standalone Lync team," White explains; "they are all integrated into an Office 365 team. So, there is a team focused exclusively on security, compliance, privacy across all things Office 365, thinking about it across the board instead of being very workload oriented." Previous tools in Exchange couldn't assume you had SharePoint and Lync as well, let alone the latest versions, correctly deployed. That made it hard to create integrated experiences. "Now we can think about security compliance as a holistic thing and solve it in a unified way," White suggests. One area the team is tackling; groups. Getting to grips with Microsoft Office 365"There are so many different ways we have tried to solve the groups problem. In email we have distribution groups and public folders, in SharePoint we have SharePoint groups, in Yammer we have Yammer groups, in Lync I can create my buddy list. They're all about having a set of people that you're doing work with and if you look across each individual product we have a half dozen ways we've solved that problem. "But now with Office 365 and developing all together and knowing that they will all be deployed together and in the right way, you can say gosh, why isn't there a concept of just a group in office 365 and it can propagate anywhere and you don't have to recreate it." http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/internet/Microsoft/webapps/word-420-100.jpg Yammer is going to be much more integrated, not just in the Office 365 portal – which is happening already – but, in the longer term, into the way you work in Office tools. "Today, I have to go somewhere and go do social things. Moving forward it's going to be a horizontal technology that lights up in a bunch of different ways." Forget the Facebook-style updates we're used to. "It's not about news feeds; it's about information being open and discoverable and accessible and that creates instant collaboration and discovery." Take something we all know, like email. "There's so much info in my inbox that's probably incredibly useful to my coworkers across the globe but they will never find it because it's locked to my inbox. There are some things that do not belong in the public forum but this could be useful for someone else to find. We're thinking about how do we unlock more and more of that. "Even simple things like; Why can't I like my email? Why can't I bring useful concepts between what are today different siloes of information in a more fluid approach? Now why not read How easy is it to migrate to Office 365?http://rss.feedsportal.com/c/669/f/415085/s/34152150/sc/4/mf.gifhttp://res3.feedsportal.com/social/twitter.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/facebook.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/linkedin.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/googleplus.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/email.png http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180264932624/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34152150/sc/4/rc/1/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180264932624/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34152150/sc/4/rc/2/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180264932624/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34152150/sc/4/rc/3/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180264932624/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34152150/a2.imghttp://pi.feedsportal.com/r/180264932624/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/34152150/a2t.imghttp://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techradar/software-news/~4/hG7n89Vs2Nc

http://cdn.mos.techradar.com/art/other/Onetimers/Waze%20on%20Windows%20Phone-470-75.jpgInstagram on Windows Phone may have stolen the app show, but Microsoft's mobile platform welcomed one more member today. Waze, the crowd-sourced traffic and navigation app, is now part of the Windows Phone family. However, only users of Windows Phone 8 will have access to road info culled from Waze's 60 million members. Community-contributed alerts for things like police activity and accidents, hazards, weather and even directions to the cheapest gas stations on your route are part of the Waze package. Google, which owns Waze, and Microsoft are on far from friendly terms, but it looks like Mountain View is willing to share at least one of its properties, which is only good news for Windows Phone users. Windows Phone statsAlong with its announcements around Instagram and Waze, Microsoft also revealed a number of stats related to Windows Phone apps. The figures show growth, but also demonstrate the OS has a long way to go before it can catch iOS and Android. According to Microsoft (by way of TechCrunch), Windows Phone has seen three billion app downloads. iOS, by comparison, has had over 60 billion apps downloaded in all. Microsoft claimed that everyday, 10 million app transactions take place on the platform, or about 300 million a month. In September, the Windows Phone counted 9 million transactions per day, while in June daily transactions totaled 6.66 million. In the time since Windows Phone 8's launch, monthly paid app revenue has gone up 181%, and total app downloads have risen 290%. Clearly, the updated OS is having an impact in the right direction. The figures are still not high for Windows Phone usage (particularly in the US), but Windows Phone handset sales have grown. Numbers-wise, Windows Phone may be far from its competitors, but it does appear to be on an upswing, especially when it comes to apps. Microsoft said there are 500 million new Windows Phone apps uploaded every day, and today the company could count two name-worthy ones in that figure. Check out the only hands on Xbox One review you need to read. http://rss.feedsportal.com/c/669/f/415085/s/33ec23f3/sc/15/mf.gifhttp://res3.feedsportal.com/social/twitter.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/facebook.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/linkedin.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/googleplus.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/email.png http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180264716632/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/33ec23f3/sc/15/rc/1/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180264716632/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/33ec23f3/sc/15/rc/2/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180264716632/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/33ec23f3/sc/15/rc/3/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180264716632/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/33ec23f3/a2.imghttp://pi.feedsportal.com/r/180264716632/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/33ec23f3/a2t.imghttp://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techradar/software-news/~4/hKNLWi6bjKI

http://cdn.mos.techradar.com/art/logos/instagram_windows_8-470-75.jpgInstagram is finally arriving on Windows Phone, filling a major hole in the Microsoft OS' app ecosystem. Users won't find it yet in the Windows Phone Store, and will have to wait until 11 a.m. PST/7 p.m. GMT to download it to their devices. More to follow... http://rss.feedsportal.com/c/669/f/415085/s/33e908f3/sc/15/mf.gifhttp://res3.feedsportal.com/social/twitter.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/facebook.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/linkedin.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/googleplus.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/email.png http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180264741788/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/33e908f3/sc/15/rc/1/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180264741788/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/33e908f3/sc/15/rc/2/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180264741788/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/33e908f3/sc/15/rc/3/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180264741788/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/33e908f3/a2.imghttp://pi.feedsportal.com/r/180264741788/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/33e908f3/a2t.imghttp://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techradar/software-news/~4/6jJUB212D3U

http://cdn.mos.techradar.com/art/software/Microsoft/Windows81/Microsoft_3D_Builder_app-470-75.jpgMicrosoft has released a new app for Windows 8.1 machines, allowing users to create 3D-printable items. The free 3D Builder app comes with a host of pre-conceived templates, including everything one could need to create their own 3D printed model train set, with their Windows 8.1 compatible 3D printer. As well as host of other templates like lego-style bricks, money clips, cookie cutters, snowflakes, pendants and the rest of it, users can also build their own items from scratch. Microsoft is also enabling users (albeit a very small number of users with Windows 8.1 and a 3D printer at this stage) to combine presets into one larger object. Ornaments, toys and more.."3D Builder has a catalog of objects you can create from ornaments to toys and more. The clean, simple user interface lets you scale, rotate and adjust what you want to print," wrote Microsoft's Kristina Libby on the official Windows blog. "Add multiple objects to a single print – even stack or push objects into one another to create new ones. Printing 3D objects created in other applications or ones that are downloaded from the Internet is really easy with the 3D Builder app and touch as well. The app is available to download from the Windows Store now and, if you're in the market for a 3D printer, Microsoft is also keep to point out it is now selling the MarkerBot Replicator 2. If that's not enough to convince you to upgrade to Windows 8.1, here are 10 really good reasons.http://rss.feedsportal.com/c/669/f/415085/s/33c1240e/sc/4/mf.gifhttp://res3.feedsportal.com/social/twitter.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/facebook.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/linkedin.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/googleplus.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/email.png http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180264409004/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/33c1240e/sc/4/rc/1/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180264409004/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/33c1240e/sc/4/rc/2/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180264409004/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/33c1240e/sc/4/rc/3/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180264409004/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/33c1240e/a2.imghttp://pi.feedsportal.com/r/180264409004/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/33c1240e/a2t.imghttp://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techradar/software-news/~4/fKnhtL1hlOw

http://cdn.mos.techradar.com//art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20171/LXF171.feat_50distros.fedora-470-75.jpg Linux is about choice, or so the popular mantra goes, and nothing represents this more than the plethora of desktop environments on offer. Most distros have at least five graphical environments in their repositories, and some offer double-digit numbers of choice. But why? What's the point of all this? Surely it's not a question of having a lot of desktop environments, but of having a single one that works properly. Well, maybe. That's what we're here to investigate. We're going to look at some of the most popular, and some of the more esoteric desktop choices to find out which one you should be using. But before we go any further, we need to understand what we're looking at. 50 best Linux distros: find the best one for youThe phrase desktop environment is notoriously slippery. We're taking the view that a desktop environment is a collection of things: it's the window manager plus a set of utilities. This may come in the form of a pre-assembled package, such as Gnome or KDE, or it may be assembled by the distro maintainer, such as CrunchBang's Openbox or Puppy's JWM. Of course, even when it comes in a pre-assembled package, it will vary between distributions. KDE, in particular, can seem like a different desktop environment in each distro. The final thing we have to say before we get started is how we're evaluating them. In short, what should a good desktop environment do? We could get technical here, but really, we don't think the average end user cares that much about technicalities of what happens behind the scenes. So, we're going to say that a good desktop environment is one that makes computing fun and simple. That's the litmus test we're going to reference when deciding what's good and what's not. That's enough about what we're doing. Bring on the desktops! Gnome 3 Can the once-popular desktop reclaim lost users? http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20174/LXF174.feat_desktops.gnome_new-420-90.jpg Gnome was once the most popular desktop environment for Linux. It may still be, but it's hard to be confident now. When Gnome 3 launched in April 2011, it changed from a traditional desktop to a new, stripped bare, minimalist environment, and users took to the internet to demand it reverted to its older ways or else they would abandon it. The developers stayed with the new style and some users have certainly left, but not in the droves that critics predicted. In fact, it's now more common to hear people say that they like the new version. This new style comes courtesy of Gnome Shell, the part of the Gnome which creates the desktop. It's a radical break from previous versions which featured a panel with Menu, Window List and Notifications area, all of which had been common to most Linux desktop environments since they existed. In explaining their design decisions Gnome says: "The Shell is designed to minimise distraction and interruption and to enable users to focus on the task at hand. A persistent Window List or Dock would interfere with this goal, serving as a constant temptation to switch focus. The separation of window switching functionality into the overview means that an effective solution to switching is provided when it's desired by the user, but that it's hidden from view when it's not necessary. The omission of a Window List or Dock also reduces the amount of screen space occupied by the Shell, and therefore makes it better suited to devices with smaller screens." This philosophy lies right at the heart of Gnome 3. It's about simplifying the computing experience down to its bare minimum, and helping the user focus on a single task. This simplification continues through to the Gnome apps, and has been a constant cause of friction. As Gnome 3 matures, developers have simplified the core apps - Nautilus in particular - and removed functionality. http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20174/LXF174.feat_desktops.gnome2-420-90.jpg This, in true computing style, can be viewed as either a feature or a bug depending on your point of view. Given Gnome's focus on simplicity, you may think things are looking good for this contender. Well, not necessarily. We said a good desktop environment should make computing simple, which isn't the same as the desktop environment being simple. For example, if you need to copy files between directories in a file manager, it's often simpler to use a split view to enable you to see both directories at once. This option, however, was removed when Nautilus was simplified. In the latest version of Gnome, the developers have relented slightly and introduced Gnome Classic. This is a series of extension that make Gnome 3 look like Gnome 2. It now sits in a halfway point where it has the look of Gnome 2, but everything in it still has the minimal Gnome 3 feel. As such, we find it hard to recommend at the moment, but it is early days and later versions may improve upon it. VerdictBest for: Minimalism Avoid if: You like to see what's going on Try on: Fedora In a nutshell: Less is more KDE How do you evaluate an ever-changing beast? http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20174/LXF174.feat_desktops.kde1-420-90.jpg The problem with evaluating KDE is that it seems to be different each time we see it. There's the vanilla KDE you get if you install it in a non-KDE distro, but many KDE-specialist distros (Mageia, ROSA, OpenSuse etc) have customised desktops. Most hard-core KDE users have personal settings that they've tweaked over the years and often provide a desktop environment radically different to the one you'd get straight after an install. In fact, the differences between two KDE installs are often so big, someone unfamiliar with Linux would be hard-pushed to recognize them as the same desktop environment. Because of this, we're going to go out on a limb and say that KDE isn't a desktop environment at all, but a framework within which you can build a desktop environment. The default settings in vanilla KDE are, in our humble opinion, terrible. It looks bland and doesn't take advantage of KDE's power. There are a number of distros that come with much better setups, particularly the three mentioned above, but they are all a little conservative. The real power of KDE comes when you dive in and customise it yourself. For the most part, this is done through widgets. While many desktops allow for some form of third party add-ons, no other embraces them as much as KDE. In fact, most of KDE is made up of these widgets. Some are distributed as part of the main KDE package, while others can be sourced from other developers, but they all have the same access to the desktop environment's internal workings. An overloaded screen full of graphically slick widgets that display all manner of information, mostly useless, is the hallmark of a new KDE user. With time and experiences, most KDE veterans whittle their way down to just a few widgets that provide them with what they need. For example, Ben has two folder views (for My Documents and Downloads folders), a weather forecaster (essential for a cycle commuter), and yuake (a terminal that drops down from the top of the screen when F12 is pressed). That provides his idea of the perfect balance between clutter and information. Yours, of course, may be different. Death by customisation http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20174/LXF174.feat_desktops.kde3-420-90.jpg The second main area that you can customise in KDE is activities. In some ways these are like far more customisable virtual desktops. They allow users to switch between highly customisable views for when they're performing different activities on their computer. As with most parts of KDE, in order for it to be useful, you have to spend time customising it to your workflow and use-cases. For many people, this is a bit too much effort and it's a feature that's rarely used. Of course, a desktop environment, as we said at the start, is about the complete package, including several utilities. While many of the others we look at here use similar GTK utilities, KDE uses Qt based ones. Typically these continue the KDE philosophy of ultimate configurability. There are enough of them that you could conceivably do all your computing in the KDE apps from the Konsole terminal emulator to the Calligra Office Suite to Konqueror, the web browser. This means you have a full set of applications that all share the same design principals, and have the same look and feel. In theory this should mean you have a consistent desktop, though it doesn't always work out as well. VerdictBest for: Customisation Avoid if: You like GTK Try on: OpenSuse, Rosa or Mageia In a nutshell: Tweaker's heaven Unity The new contender has made friends and enemies http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20174/LXF174.feat_desktops.unity-420-90.jpg After the demise of Gnome 2, the Gnome team, as we have seen, created Gnome 3 with a completely redesigned desktop. Ubuntu, previously the leading Gnome distro, decided not to use the new Gnome but to create its own desktop and called it Unity. There have been cries of it being near-identical to Gnome 3, but these seem to be from the superficial standpoint of the bottom panel going, and most of the action happening in the top-left corner. Unity doesn't have the same philosophy of maximum simplification, and the two desktops are actually quite different to use. The Unity desktop, though tidy, is busier than in Gnome 3. There's a Launcher and Window List on the desktop, so you don't have to switch to a new screen to access basic functions. Perhaps the most unusual thing about the Launcher is that you can pin web apps to it as well as native applications. Sceptics claim that these are little more than links to the web address, which have been available in other desktop environments for years. These sceptics have a point, but the 'little more' can be important. For example, it allows web apps to access the notifications area. While not everyone feels comfortable using the cloud, this makes things like web mail a little nicer to use for those that do. Strong functionality theme http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20174/LXF174.feat_desktops.hud-420-90.jpg Perhaps the big showdown between Gnome 3 and Unity is in the Overview vs Dash. These are roughly equivalent to the menus on traditional desktop environments. Places where you can launch apps (that aren't in the launcher), and search for things. Like Gnome 3's Overview, Unity's Dash is accessed through the top-left corners. Unlike Gnome 3, though, it doesn't have a Window List or a 'favourites' bar, since these are included in the main desktop. Again, we see the differences between the different philosophies shine through. Gnome 3 is as simple as possible, while Unity's has more functionality. By default, it allows the user to search through their applications, files stored locally and products on Amazon. The idea is to create a single point where the user can search for anything: just open the Dash and type what you want. The inclusion of the online results has upset some privacy campaigners, and it is possible to turn it off in the Settings panel. The biggest feature of Unity's Dash that's absent in the Gnome version are the lenses. These allow you to focus your search on a particular area. For example, the videos lens allows you to search online videos. For those of us in the UK, this seems to bring back results mostly from the BBC's iPlayer. There's also a Wikipedia lens to help you quickly find articles on the online encyclopedia. We can see real potential in these lenses, but for the moment they feel a little under done. The videos lens, for example, doesn't search a wide enough range of sources. If it provided a single point where you could search all video sources you had access to, then it would be a great feature. As it is, we find we hardly use it. We found that it took some time to get used to Unity, but now we can't remember why we ever used app menus. VerdictBest for: Big icons and web apps Avoid if: You like menus and panels Try on: Ubuntu In a nutshell: Innovative & bold Mate and Cinnamon A tale of two Gnome forks http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20174/LXF174.feat_desktops.cinnamon-420-90.jpg When Gnome and Unity both made radical changes to their desktops, two desktop environments emerged that sought to provide a comfortable home for disillusioned users. They both built upon Gnome code, and they both aimed to recreate a familiar look and feel, but they took different paths to that goal. Here we'll look at Mate and Cinnamon. If you start either of them, you'll be presented with a similar screen. There's a desktop where files can be dropped, a panel along the bottom which shows notifications, a list of open windows, and an Applications menu in the bottom left corner. For the purposes of this article, we'll refer to this as the traditional desktop. It's been the way many of us have interacted with our computers for almost two decades now, and most people find it easy to use. The differences between the two desktop environments really come down to the pedigree. Mate is a continuation of Gnome 2, while Cinnamon is a fork of Gnome 3, which is designed to retain the structure of Gnome 2. The most obvious difference between the two is that Cinnamon takes advantage of modern hardware to provide slick graphics while Mate runs more efficiently on older hardware. The extra power of Cinnamon is used to provide things like an overview (swipe the mouse into the top-left corner and it will display an overview of the open windows). Less dextrous users, though, can find this annoying when they go for the file menu a little too aggressively and suddenly find that the desktop disappears. In the latest version of Cinnamon (1.8), desklets have been introduced. These allow you to put dynamic objects on your desktop. For example, clocks or comic viewers that automatically update themselves. These are similar to widgets that are found in KDE, though they aren't as all-pervasive. Since they're a new feature, we don't yet know whether they'll become as powerful as KDE's widgets, or if they're just going to add a little glamour to the Cinnamon desktop. Pick your Gimp http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20174/LXF174.feat_desktops.mate2-420-90.jpg The second biggest difference is that Cinnamon is based on the GTK 3 tool kit while Mate is built on GTK 2. This means the two look slightly different, and match a different set of applications. Of course, using a desktop that uses GTK 2 doesn't mean you can't use software using GTK 3 and visa versa, but it isn't as smooth an experience. As it currently stands, almost all applications that aren't part of the Gnome project have a GTK 2 version. However, this is likely to change in the future as developers start to take advantage of the newer GTK 3 features. We find that there is little to differentiate between the two, and users that like one will probably like the other. Perhaps, as time goes on, the two desktops will diverge to target specific userbases, but this is pure speculation. We do know, though, that these two young desktops have rapidly become among the most popular interfaces for Linux. They've done this by listening to users and providing them with what they want. Verdict: MateBest for: Older computers Avoid if: You like GTK 3 Try on: Mint In a nutshell: Gnome 2 lives! Verdict: CinnamonBest for: Hipsters Avoid if: You have an older machine Try on: Mint In a nutshell: A traditional desktop Xfce The original refuge to Gnome 3 http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20174/LXF174.feat_desktops.xfce1-420-90.jpg Many people saw Xfce as a natural refuge for Gnome 2 users when Gnome 3 came out. It's GTK-based desktop environment and has a roughly similar layout. However, many of those who initially joined it after leaving Gnome 2 have since moved on, including Linus. This is because the two desktops were designed for different users. Xfce's graphics and effects are a little less impressive, and there are less controls. Thunar, the file manager, is also simpler than those in the bigger platforms, but perfectly functional for most uses. All this comes from the days before Gnome 3, when Xfce carved out a niche as a stripped-down Gnome 2-like desktop for low-powered machines. It does have a few features that some of the even lower-powered desktops (such as LXDE) don't, like launcher panels, but these aren't as graphically slick as in the more powerful environments. In the last couple of years, other desktops have come to fill in the niche of Gnome 2, while Xfce has continued to do what it's always done well: a simple, low-powered Linux desktop. We wouldn't quite feel right about describing it as 'no frills', but it certainly has a very limited number of frills. Whether or not it has enough is a matter of personal taste. VerdictBest for: Not too minimalist minimalism Avoid if: You like a high level of configurability Try on: Xubuntu, Debian In a nutshell: Aims for simple, but not too simple LXDE The feather weight desktop that still packs a punch http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20174/LXF174.feat_desktops.lxde1-420-90.jpg There are basically two ways to design a desktop environment. One is to ask yourself 'how much can we provide to the user?' and the other is to ask yourself 'what's the least we can provide to the user?' LXDE is designed with the latter in mind. The window manager is simple, as is the file manager. In short, there's no cruft. Nothing that you don't need. The result is a clean interface that's pleasantly free of interference. It's a cool glass of water after drinking flavoured pop. Some might call it boring, and they'd have a point, but does that really matter? Should your desktop environment be exciting, or should it stay out of your way and let you get on with what you're doing with the minimum of fuss? If you're of the latter opinion then LXDE could be for you. It's enjoying a certain renaissance at the moment due to it being the most popular desktop environment on the Raspberry Pi. The two projects fit together well because they're both based on the principle that computing is about function, not form. Of course, it is a little bit about form, and we think the incarnation of LXDE in Lubuntu has the best theme and set up, so it's a great place to start for people new to this environment. VerdictBest for: Low resource use Avoid if: You like graphical effects Try on: Lubuntu In a nutshell: A great desktop for older machines A few unusual choices Enlightenment http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20174/LXF174.feat_desktops.e17_2shot-420-90.jpg There's no way to hide the fact that Enlightenment is about eye candy. Things fade, pop and shimmer with glee any time you do anything. Some people find all these distractions and window dressing (sic) a bit too much, but for others it adds a sense of humour to their computing. Enlightenment describes itself as a desktop shell, which means it's desktop environment without any applications supplied. Since the styling is so different from the others (from which you'll need to take software) this means the result is a system that looks inconsistent. However, if you like desktop effects, but don't like KDE, Enlightenment may be for you. Sugar http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20174/LXF174.feat_desktops.sugar1-420-90.jpg When Nicholas Negroponte founded One Laptop Per Child, the project kicked off with extremely limited hardware, so the developers set about creating a desktop environment that was both very light on resources and very child-friendly. Given that most of their target users had never seen a computer let alone used one before, it had to be easy to use as well. Sugar is the result of this. It's a little too simplistic for most uses, but it's excellent for kids with its big blocky icons and a high-contrast colour scheme that make it great for their first digital steps. Try a Fedora spin here http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick. Openbox http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20174/LXF174.feat_desktops.openbox-420-90.jpg We said at the start that a desktop environment is a tricky thing to define. Openbox is a perfect example of why. A number of the other desktop environments use Openbox as their window manager of choice (such as LXDE and razorQT). However, with some configuration, it can be turned into a desktop environment in its own right, and that's exactly what the developers of CrunchBang have done. It's stripped bare environment that perhaps has something in common with Gnome 3, though not quite to that extreme. It's minimalism has endeared it to sysadmins and hardcore users that appreciate the lack of desktop bloat. Puppy http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20174/LXF174.feat_desktops.puppy-420-90.jpg This distro has built a desktop environment around JWM, a slim window manager that's not used in many other setups. As you may be able to guess, this is one designed to be frugal with resources. The end result is pleasant, though not spectacular, and works admirably on older hardware. It's designed in the traditional fashion and does a good job of just staying out of the way. It can look a bit dated when compared to it's more resouce-intensive cousins, but as many people find that endearing as annoying. Not many people would pick this for a new machine, but it does a great job of keeping machines running that would otherwise be scrapped. Xmonad http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20174/LXF174.feat_desktops.xmonad-420-90.jpg If there's one desktop environment that stands out from all the others we have here it's this one. Before you start using it, it's best to forget everything you think you know about how a desktop should work. Right, have you done that? The desktop in Xmonad is split into tiles, each of which contains an application. You can shuffle the tiles around, change their sizes, and focus. You can also use the mouse within the tiles, but not to sort out the desktop like you would with windows. The result looks a little peculiar, but it is surprisingly usable once you get used to the new layout. Of course, it won't suit everyone. There's a guided tour to get you started here www.xmonad.org/tour.html. RazorQT http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20174/LXF174.feat_desktops.razorqt-420-90.jpg As we've seen, there's a large range of lightweight desktops for Linux. However, almost all of them use the GTK toolkit which could cause problems as development has shifted to the less lightweight GTK 3. (LXDE has started work on a Qt version, but it could be some time before it's ready for mainstream use). Many people also prefer the look and feel of Qt. RazorQT was created to fill this particular gap. It's built using the same Qt toolkit as KDE, but without any of the bloat. As yet, it doesn't have many applications, but works with the KDE ones. It's still young when compared to most of the other ones in this roundup, and we expect it to improve and start to challenge the other lightweight environments soon. Conclusion If you ask ten computer users what they want from a computer interface, you'll get ten different answers, so why should they all use the same desktop environment? The answer is simple: they shouldn't. Because of this, we're not limiting ourselves to a single 'best desktop' because we don't think there is one, but we're not completely copping out. We're going to pick our favourite desktop in four categories: traditional, newstyle, tweakers and outlier. We feel this recognition of different styles of computer use has become especially important in the past couple of years as the desktop possibilities in Linux have diversified significantly. There has always been a range of desktops, but now, more than ever before, there are a range of good desktops. Not all of them will suit everyone, but everyone, we think, will be able to find a desktop that works well for them. For the traditionalists We have to say that there are no bad choices in the category at the moment. Xfce, LXDE, Mate, Cinnamon and KDE are all great desktops. They all have good and bad points, but we think that most traditionalists would be happy with any of them. However, there has to be a winner, and we're picking Mate for the way it continues the Gnome 2 feel through to the present day. For the brave new world This one comes down to Gnome 3 and Unity. Plenty of people hate both, but there's definitely a demand for much bolder desktop designs. We're going to go with Unity as our top desktop for the brave new world simply because we can't align ourselves with Gnome's stripped bare design. We like we need a little bit more activity on the desktop. Yes, sometimes it distracts us, but that's not always a bad thing. For the tweakers Let's be honest, there was only ever going to be one winner here and it's KDE. Although, an honourable mention should go out to Cinnamon now that it includes desklets. Enlightenment is another option, though we feel it doesn't match KDE as a complete desktop environment. Maybe next year, KDE will have a challenger. For the outliers We're going to pick the desktop that adds the most to the world of desktops. That is, the one that has the most useful features that can't be done in any common environment. The winner offers a radically different way of doing things that we found surprisingly usable. In fact, we were tempted to switch. Hats off then to xmonad. 50 best Linux distros: find the best one for youhttp://rss.feedsportal.com/c/669/f/415085/s/33c0f519/sc/4/mf.gifhttp://res3.feedsportal.com/social/twitter.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/facebook.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/linkedin.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/googleplus.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/email.png http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180264306201/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/33c0f519/sc/4/rc/1/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180264306201/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/33c0f519/sc/4/rc/2/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180264306201/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/33c0f519/sc/4/rc/3/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180264306201/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/33c0f519/a2.imghttp://pi.feedsportal.com/r/180264306201/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/33c0f519/a2t.imghttp://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techradar/software-news/~4/QcHjKgpdTQM

http://cdn.mos.techradar.com/art/software/Twitter/Vine/vine_windowsphone_official-470-75.jpgBecause any video longer than six seconds probably isn't worth watching, Twitter's Vine app has finally arrived on Windows Phone 8. Vine climbs to Microsoft's mobile OS ahead of rival Facebook's photo-sharing Instagram app, which is expected to arrive on WP8 soon as well. Windows Phone users have been waiting for Vine and other popular apps to make the jump to their platform, but the going has been slow. With makers of the most popular apps finally taking notice of the platform, though, that could soon change. Get excitedThe Vine app for Windows Phone is nearly identical to the apps on other platforms, with one small extra that Vine designer Ryan Swigart mentioned in a blog post today. Vine users on Windows Phone can pin the accounts of other users to their home screens, making them easy to access. "We love to see what each person contributes to Vine, and we're excited to welcome Windows Phone users to the community," Swigart wrote. He invited Vine users to tweet their feedback to Vine's official Twitter account. Stepping up the gameVine and Instagram have been available for years on iOS and Android, but Windows Phone's customer base is still extremely small compared to the more popular mobile operating systems. Microsoft is doing everything in its power to change that, including buying up its main device maker, Nokia. Nokia just unveiled a new Windows Phone 8 tablet, the Lumia 2520, and the Finnish company is believed to have plenty of other WP8 devices in the works. These may include products with suspicious codenames like "Goldfinger," "Moneypenny," "Phantom," "Normandy," and "Spinel," according to a tipster's report yesterday. Besides Instagram and Vine, we're also expecting Flipboard to arrive on WP8 soon, considering the aggregation app was shown off at Nokia's Lumia 2520 announcement. Nokia's new phone codenames turn to Bond, Breaking Bad for inspirationhttp://rss.feedsportal.com/c/669/f/415085/s/3399fd8d/sc/15/mf.gifhttp://res3.feedsportal.com/social/twitter.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/facebook.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/linkedin.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/googleplus.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/email.png http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180264038093/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3399fd8d/sc/15/rc/1/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180264038093/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3399fd8d/sc/15/rc/2/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180264038093/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3399fd8d/sc/15/rc/3/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180264038093/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3399fd8d/a2.imghttp://pi.feedsportal.com/r/180264038093/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3399fd8d/a2t.imghttp://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techradar/software-news/~4/gLu5u4Ak5aQ

http://cdn.mos.techradar.com//art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20174/LXF174.round.p08_tails_desktop-470-75.jpg Among other things here at Linux Format we are also a bit clairvoyant. We decided that it was the right moment to look at 'anonymous' Linux distributions many weeks before mainstream media started discussing PRISM. Of course, even if nothing like that existed, there would still be many good reasons to protect at least part of what you want or need to do online: the examples go from whistle-blowing to home banking or super-invasive advertising. In all these cases, proper configuration of (at least!) the tools you use for web surfing, email, instant messaging and file sharing is crucial. Linux 'anonymous' distros are designed to help in just these kinds of situations. As a minimum, these systems are pre-configured to make it easier to surf the web without telling everybody in clear text where, or who, you really are. Android in 2020: the future of Google's mobile OS exploredWe put 'anonymous' between quotes for a couple of reasons: first of all, successfully hiding one's identity online takes quite more attention and discipline than just installing the right software. In the second place, and sometimes the first, the eye that you may want to appear anonymous to is the computer you're using! Why risk leaking passwords (or worse) to trojans and keyloggers when you must temporarily use somebody else's machine? We hope this roundup will help you cope with all this stress. How we tested... In the next pages, you'll find five Linux distributions designed with anonymity and general privacy protection as their primary objectives. The first selection criterion was ease of use for beginners and being actively maintained. There are other similar distros out there, but some haven't been updated for a long time. Next, we deliberately chose systems as diverse as possible, in order to give you an idea of the many faces of (Linux-based) secure computing. We've tested these distros as virtual machines or in live mode and we've also noted how they will cope with wired and wireless Internet connections. In all cases, the primary goals were to check how complete each system is, and how easy it is to start using the most privacy-sensitive applications in their default configurations. Our selection IprediaOS Liberté Privatix Tails Whonix Architecture What's in the box? What are the main features of each distribution? http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20174/LXF174.round.p01_whonix_applia-420-90.jpg As important as it is, careful selection and configuration of applications is not the initial task of a 'privacy first!' Linux developer. Before that, it's essential to define, and restrict as much as possible, how the system should interact with the hardware it runs on and the Internet. Though not sufficient, an effective part of online anonymity is a distro that is created from scratch every single time you use it, and destroyed as soon as that session is over. This guarantees that no cookies or malware that you may get will be there to do more damage the next time you go online. All but one of the distros reviewed here use this as their default approach: they are available as binary images that you may and should directly install on CD-ROM or (better) on USB keys. Liberté ships with a Secure Boot-based trusted boot chain and the Hardened Gentoo kernel with all the GR security patches. Their function is to give each process and user only the absolute lowest privileges they need to work properly. Liberté is also available as a virtualisation appliance (the OVA file on the website) ready to load inside VirtualBox. I2P is a P2P anonymizing network that, like Tor, provides encrypted communications. IprediaOS is built, on a Fedora foundation to use all the features of I2P. Privatix and Tails are Debian spin-offs. They both have (like Liberté) utilities that clean the RAM at every shut-down and tools that make installation of persistent directories for your files on encrypted USB drives a snap. Double virtualisation Whonix is very different. It's a pair of Debian-based virtual appliances that you must download and run, simultaneously, in two virtual machines. The first one is the Gateway: its only task is to filter and route, through the Tor anonymizing network, all the Internet traffic of the other one, called 'Workstation'. This is the desktop that you will see and use: besides having all its applications configured to maximize privacy, it's built so it can only reach the Internet through the Gateway. The result is something, as its developer puts it, in which "IP and DNS leaks are impossible". Malware running in the Workstation can't find out the user's real location, because no part of that system knows what its IP address is. You may also run the two Whonix components on different machines, or use only the Gateway to isolate, in the same way, other operating systems. The downside is that Whonix isn't a portable operating system ready to be run on other computers off an USB key. Verdict IprediaOS - 4/5 Liberté - 4/5 Privatix - 4/5 Tails - 4/5 Whonix - 4/5 Hard to sum up such diverse architectures in numbers. They are all good. Usage options Different identities, computing on the road and file persistence. http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20174/LXF174.round.p02_persistence_tails-420-90.jpg Do you need different anonymous digital identities simultaneously (eg one for Twitter and one for online payments)? Do you also need to preserve many files from one session to the next, perhaps on different computers? Can you be anonymous all the time, for everything? We can answer the last question quite easily: Probably not. Registration to public Wi-Fi hotspots or services like Paypal may not work through Tor. Whonix can't be used on computers without VirtualBox, while the other distributions, instead, are explicitly made to run from CD-ROM or USB drives and all let you disable Tor with little or no effort. All the distros offer persistence, except for Whonix, this feature comes in the form of encrypted folders ( / persist in Liberté) if you install to hard drive or USB key. Alternatively, there are utilities to encrypt external drives. Whonix makes it easier to have multiple simultaneous identities with persistence: by setting up in VirtualBox multiple independent Workstations, attached to the one Whonix Gateway that you should have created anyway. Doing the same with the installable or ISO versions of the other distribution is also possible, of course, but Whonix explains how to handle configuration details in a better way. Verdict IprediaOS - 4/5 Liberté - 4/5 Privatix - 4/5 Tails - 4/5 Whonix - 3/5 Whonix is harder to run on portable drives and, therefore, scored lower. User interface Can you be anonymous, and still use a familiar Linux-based desktop? If you are serious about anonymity but also cannot spend lots of time tinkering with source code, you'll need to use a specialized Gnu/Linux system instead of general purpose distributions, such as Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint or SUSE. The focus on anonymity and, in general, security means that all these systems need to include as little code as possible, but be as stable as possible, and in case you hadn't realised it yet, here is one corollary of this fact: almost surely, your usual, favourite Linux desktop will not be available. Not in its latest and greatest version, at least. While you'll have to accept this, it is also important to figure out which system will require the least adaptation effort. So let's then assess how each of these distributions looks and feels. IprediaOS - 4/5http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20174/LXF174.round.p05_ipredia-420-90.jpg Built on top of Fedora, IprediaOS's default desktop environment is a Gnome/Unity-like one (pictured right). Besides English, the system is also available in French, German, Spanish, Swedish and Russian. If you really dislike the default look, or need anonymity even on pretty old computers, that's not a big deal. You can always download the LXDE-based edition. The boot menu has entries for a Safe Mode (how much you would need it, is another issue) and for memory tests. The ORCA tools and the eekboard virtual keyboard offer some accessibility support. IprediaOS can take up to a few minutes, after boot, before being able to access the Internet. We didn't experience any such delay, but should it happen to you: it only means that the internal I2P router hasn't found other I2P peers immediately ready to forward your packets. Liberté Linux - 4/5http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20174/LXF174.round.p06_liberte_desktop-420-90.jpg The distribution's home page says that Liberté "assumes willingness and capability to study operation of non-mainstream operating systems and software." Don't let that warning scare you. This actually applies to all the distributions in this roundup, but you don't need to be a real hacker to use them. Besides, we didn't find Liberté to be more difficult than the others. The window manager is OpenBox, which maybe intimidating at first sight, but is really slick and fast to use. If you need to run Liberté on low-end hardware you can even boot it in VESA graphics mode. The default web browser (pictured), with the Figaro Password Manager, Claws Email and the cables communication system set up panel, is Epiphany with HTML5 support. The Florence virtual keyboard will protect your passwords from any keylogger that may be present in the host computer. Privatix- 4/5http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20174/LXF174.round.p07_privatix_desktop-420-90.jpg Being based on Debian 6, Privatix sports a traditional Gnome desktop, with IceWeasel as default browser. Some may find the simple, clean desktop layout a bit dated, but we liked it, and it may feel much less alien to newbies than those of some competitors. The same applies to the Application menu, that only contains six entries: Accessories, Graphics, Internet, Office, Sound & Video and System Tools. Another thing we liked a lot about Privatix is one of its settings, which is a good reminder that online anonymity must include certain easy configuration tricks: the default search engine for IceWeasel isn't Google or any of the other big ones, but Ixquick which calls itself "the world's most private search engine." Tails - 4/5http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20174/LXF174.round.p08_tails_desktop-420-90.jpg Tails is an acronym standing for 'The Amnesic Incognito Live System'. At first sight, after presenting Privatix, it's also hard to say something about its look and feel. Not because this is a bad distribution, no! It's simply that since Tails too is based on Debian 6, the default desktop is almost identical to the one in Privatix. After playing with Tails a bit, however, several differences emerge. To begin with, Tails was the only system tested on which setting a non-English keyboard worked without problems on all the computers used for the roundup. On average, Tails was also the faster system to boot (the boot options only are Tails and Tailsafe). As in Liberté, a virtual keyboard is just one click away, together with the ORCA reader and magnifier for short-sighted users. Whonix - 3/5http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20174/LXF174.round.p09_whonix_desktop-420-90.jpg Besides its dual-virtual-machine architecture, Whonix is unique in this roundup also for another reason: instead of some Gnome variant or simpler interfaces such as LXDE or OpenBox, this is the only system that uses a dull-looking, but full blown KDE as desktop environment. The left part of the root window is full of icons. Maybe a bit too many. Anyway, even if it's a bit heavier visually, Whonix may help inexperienced users feel less estranged. Of course, remember to start the Whonix Gateway first, or you won't be able to see much besides a huge warning window! Every now and then, select Applications >System >Whonix Check from the system menu: in a couple of minutes you'll get a complete report of how up to date your Whonix installation is! Media and hardware support Let's see online videos anonymously. No, wait… This is likely to be the section of the roundup that you'll be less happy to read. To be fair, it's not the fault of the distributions, but a direct consequence of the constraints they must respect. In all our tests, the sound and graphics cards were always recognized. We found playback of local files worked without problems, that is, whenever the necessary codecs were already present. Otherwise, we found we had less choices than with normal Linux distros. The several browsers all play HTML5 video clips but not Flash ones. You would have to install the corresponding plug-ins manually. Unless you chose Liberté, because Epiphany and the Flash plug-ins for Linux aren't really compatible. In any case, be warned that using Flash in and by itself increases the risks of attacks to your privacy. On to the worst news now. In theory, all these distributions should support things like 3G modems, Bluetooth and, above all, lots of Wi-Fi chipsets. In practice, as with codecs, they won't be as up to date as mainstream Linux platforms. If you only planned to use these distributions on your computers, you may be lucky, or you may have to do a lot of initial configuration. If, instead, your hope was an USB stick ready to use 'as is' for every Wi-Fi chipset you may throw at it you'll be disappointed! The exception would be Whonix which, as running only inside VirtualBox, couldn't care less of how its host accesses the Internet. VerdictIprediaOS - 3/5 Liberté - 3/5 Privatix - 3/5 Tails - 3/5 Whonix - 3/5 Basically, expect to face issues with Wi-Fi access or media playback. Office and graphics apps What? No slide-shows? Yes, the primary purpose of an anonymous distribution is to help you surf and do other things online anonymously. Sometimes, however, it's just impossible to limit yourself to that. The most common case may be the one in which you receive some graphic or office document over the net that you must check, or maybe edit quickly and then send somewhere else: logging off just to open one file would be really annoying, wouldn't it? From this point of view, the best distructions are Tails and Privatix: as they both come with OpenOffice 3, Gimp and Inkscape. Tails also includes publishing software, Scribus. Liberté and (at least by default) Whonix have much less on offer. The Office menu of Liberté only lists AbiWord, Gnumeric, Evince for PDF files and FBreader for ebooks. Slide-shows? No, sorry. That's still more than Whonix, which, in the same menu, only lists the Okular PDF reader. IprediaOS? Well, reading PDFs using Evince is pretty much all you'll find in the box. On the positive side, both IprediaOS and Whonix may allow for additional software, using the same GUI interfaces available on Ubuntu, Fedora and many other popular Linux distributions. In theory, that is. In practice, while Synaptic in Whonix found and let us install an old version of LibreOffice (1.3.5.4!), the Gnome Package Manager in IprediaOS found no office packages in its pre-configured repositories. Verdict IprediaOS - 2/5 Liberté - 3/5 Privatix - 5/5 Tails - 5/5 Whonix - 3/5 Tails and Privatix have all you need to do most office and graphics work. Privacy and anonymity The Internet is much more than websites! http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20174/LXF174.round.p10_susimail_iprediaos-420-90.jpg Web surfing isn't everything, you may want to use your anonymous system more for email or instant messaging. All the distros are well equipped for this with one caveat: some of the most secure solutions may work out of the box only between users of the same distro. Let's look at email first. All the systems include some standard email client for Linux with plug-ins. Whonix, for example, provides Thunderbird with the TorBirdy interface to Tor. Privatix contains both Evolution and IceDove, with digital signatures and message encryption enabled by default. Tails achieves the same goal with Claws. Liberté users get a more interesting alternative: Claws with the Cables Communications system, a server-less protocol that routes messages directly between Tor or I2P nodes. A Cables identity consists of two long, very cryptic host names. After creating it, you'll be able to exchange email anonymously with other Cables users with the anonymous email address YourUserName@hostname. It will be much slower (up to a few days) than normal email, but you will get repudiability, delivery receipts and perfect forward secrecy. Besides Evolution, IprediaOS has an interface to Susimail, a free pseudonymous email service that routes messages via the I2P network. All the distros include some support for anonymous file sharing, normally via Bit Torrent. In IM terms, Liberté and Tails have Pidgin with the OTR (Off The Record) plug-in to provide authentication, encryption and deniability. Liberté also has XChat, which is also the default IM client in IprediaOS and Whonix. Privatix has Pidgin and Empathy. Another service present in all the systems we reviewed is unified management of passwords or encryption keys, with tools like Figaro or the GNU Privacy Assistant. Curiously, while all distros make creation of encrypted file systems easy, there seems to be no explicit, built-in support for steganography. Our roundup contenders offer many more applications and functions to enhance privacy and anonymity, and we'll close this section by mentioning just a couple that we found interesting. In IprediaOS, all the services of the I2P network are accessible from one simple, web-based I2P console. Tails, instead, has the Metadata Anonymisation Toolkit. This service removes sensitive metadata hidden in files, from geographical coordinates in photos to the editing history in office documents. Verdict IprediaOS - 5/5 Liberté - 5/5 Privatix - 4/5 Tails - 4/5 Whonix - 4/5 IprediaOS and Liberté get the top score for their support of alternatives. Documentation How can I learn what I should do? http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20174/LXF174.round.p11_ipredia_docs-420-90.jpg Good tutorials and other helpful documentation are always important for any software program you want to use. This is certainly the case with anonymous distributions, which may otherwise cause frustration even for people familiar with running Linux. Unfortunately, as it stands, the IprediaOS website only contains one video tutorial, explaining how to start the operating system in VirtualBox. This lack of material, however, is compensated by the many links to forums and other resources in the I2P Web console. The documentation for Privatix is also scarce, at least in English. The full FAQ and manual is only available in German. Liberté, Tails and Whonix, each have plenty of useful stuff in their respective websites. (Strictly speaking, most of the pages apply as they only cover the specific distro). Do yourself a big favour by following this little bit of advice: even if you decide now, just by reading this article, which system fits your needs, spend some time browsing the tutorials, FAQs and other documents of these three platforms. This will help you a lot to understand both the potential and the general limits of online anonymity and privacy. Whonix, for example, has a great list of things that you should not do if you don't want to nullify all your attempts to anonymity. Most of that advice is valid on any operating system. On the Tails website, we'd recommend that you should read at least the article on how to securely delete files and clean disk space. Verdict IprediaOS - 3/5 Liberté - 4/5 Privatix - 2/5 Tails - 4/5 Whonix- 4/5 Liberté, Tails and Whonix all provide plenty of documentation for their distros. The verdict http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/art/magazines/Linux/Issue%20174/LXF174.round.p12_tails_winner-420-90.jpg Your ultimate anonymous Linux distribution will be the one closer to your actual needs. It'll take a trial period to figure out what those needs are. Sometimes, it will be really easy: the winning distro may just be the only one you'll manage, without recompiling code, to get to speak with the Wi-Fi chipset of your laptop. That said, we were mainly interested to find which distro could make it easier for you to use the web anonymously, and learn the best practices that you should always follow, regardless of what operating system you're running. IprediaOS is perfect if you prefer I2P to Tor, or if both you and your partners need something like Susimail. Whonix is great for multiple simultaneous identities. It is also the only way to provide more guarantees of anonymity to relatives etc who, for whatever reason, may continue to go online with Windows. Whonix, however, is not made to go as-is on portable drives. We must say that we miss a turn-key bundle for Whonix and VirtualBox, that would make it possible to launch them with one click, even on Windows boxes, without rebooting. Oh, and if that bundle included some other barebone Linux distribution that does nothing but boot, connect to the Internet (which means having as many up to date Wi-Fi drivers as possible) and start the VirtualBox appliances then that would be even better! Right now, and looking at online anonymity from a beginner's point of view, the distribution that comes out as the winner is Tails. The decision would have been harder if Privatix had supplied more English documentation, because that, too, is one really nice little system. The main advantages of Tails are its readiness for USB installation and the complete nature of its desktop and its documentation. The Tails system menu also contains enough applications to make you do almost everything you may need without rebooting. The documentation, while not interesting as the one for Whonix, is more than adequate to help even Linux beginners. Yay for Tails, then! 1st: Tails - 4/5Web: https://tails.boum.org | Licence: GPL Version 0.18 The best compromise for beginners between security and ease of use. 2nd: Privatix - 3/5Web: www.mandalka.name/privatix | Licence: GPL Version 11.04.11_en Almost as good as Tails, but with fewer applications and documentation. 3rd: Liberté Linux - 3/5Web: http://dee.su/liberte | Licence: GPL Version 2012.3 Very well designed, but not a good first anonymous distro for beginners. 4th: IprediaOS Web: http://www.ipredia.org/ | Licence: GPL Version 1-i686 The way to go when Tor isn't enough, but has fewer apps than Tails. 5th: Whonix Web: http://sourceforge.net/p/whonix/ | Licence: GPL Version 0.5.6 An interesting architecture, but not as easily portable as the others. Also consider... The structure of software reviews strongly depends on the type of apps being reviewed. As obvious as it is, this isn't a banal issue. The actual distro test was both fun and relatively easy, but figuring out how to structure what we found and wanted to share was much harder. The reason simply is that, with this kind of software, the user attitude is a much more critical component than in, say, office suites. How do you group (or define) the several features of a distro to take this into account, in a way that helps everybody to understand why they should care? We hope we succeeded. Now download the distros, and try them all! No, wait! Here's one last bit of advice. Please spend some time looking at all the privacy plug-ins and extensions that these distros put in their browsers: learn what they are, how they are configured and why they were added in the first place. Then, install and use them in the browser of your everyday Linux distro too. It won't hurt, and it may be the best way to become gradually familiar with the world of anonymous browsing. Now why not check out our guide to the future of Android?http://rss.feedsportal.com/c/669/f/415085/s/3395ab0f/sc/4/mf.gifhttp://res3.feedsportal.com/social/twitter.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/facebook.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/linkedin.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/googleplus.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/email.png http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180264090591/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3395ab0f/sc/4/rc/1/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180264090591/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3395ab0f/sc/4/rc/2/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180264090591/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3395ab0f/sc/4/rc/3/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180264090591/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3395ab0f/a2.imghttp://pi.feedsportal.com/r/180264090591/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3395ab0f/a2t.imghttp://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techradar/software-news/~4/3YHZRNDNmeo

http://cdn.mos.techradar.com/art/mobile_phones/Windows%20Phone/WindowsPhone-04-470-75.jpgWindows Phone 7 users and old-timey Zune player owners will no longer be able to view video they've purchased through the Xbox Video store, Microsoft has announced. The company emailed customers this weekend to inform them that, from February 2014, that video content they own will no longer be supported on their devices. "This email is to notify you that in late February, 2014, Xbox will be making an update to our video catalog," the company wrote: "This update will allow us to more quickly and efficiently add the highest quality video content to the Xbox Video service. "As a result, beginning in late February 2014, any Xbox Video content you own as of then, will no longer be playable through the Zune PC client, Zune devices, or Windows Phone 7 devices. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause." Still available on other devicesThe announcement is a blow for those users on Windows Phone 7 or Zune devices, that have invested in video from the Xbox Video store. Microsoft has not indicated that any compensation will be offered to those users who have lost access to their video content and did not offer hope that the Xbox Video app will relaunch on Windows Phone 7. "You can still enjoy all of your owned content at XboxVideo.com on your PC or Mac, or on your Xbox One, Xbox 360, Windows 8 & 8.1 PC and tablet, or Windows Phone 8." http://rss.feedsportal.com/c/669/f/415085/s/3384c4bd/sc/15/mf.gifhttp://res3.feedsportal.com/social/twitter.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/facebook.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/linkedin.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/googleplus.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/email.png http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180263888784/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3384c4bd/sc/15/rc/1/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180263888784/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3384c4bd/sc/15/rc/2/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180263888784/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3384c4bd/sc/15/rc/3/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180263888784/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3384c4bd/a2.imghttp://pi.feedsportal.com/r/180263888784/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3384c4bd/a2t.imghttp://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techradar/software-news/~4/CRwiGzrDlZ4

http://cdn.mos.techradar.com//art/mobile_phones/Nokia/Lumia1520/ATT_Lumia_1520_stacked-470-75.jpgWhat's black, yellow, white or red and can now be pre-ordered from your friendly neighborhood AT&T store? If you answered the latest, hottest Nokia Lumia smartphone, take a bow. AT&T has announced the launch of the Nokia Lumia 1520, the carrier's latest Windows Phone 8 exclusive will swoop into stores with its luscious 6-inch 1080p HD display on Friday, November 22. But that doesn't mean Lumia fans have to wait two weeks to throw their hard-earned cash in AT&T's direction - the carrier has opened the floodgates for online and retail pre-orders today. Available in your choice of matte black, matte yellow, matte white or glossy red, the big-screen Lumia 1520 arrives with 16GB of internal storage, plus a microSD slot ready to load up to 64GB of additional space for photos, videos and more. Big screen, bigger offersThe Lumia 1520 at AT&T was the subject of some mystery earlier this week when Microsoft put up then pulled a pre-order page showing a release date of November 15. The new date of November 22 (which also happens to be Xbox One launch day) was floated November 7, and now we know it was right on the money. Nokia's Lumia 1520 is notable as the first Windows Phone device on the market with an expansive display capable of showing more Live Tiles, offering more space for games, videos and social apps, and even reading e-books. AT&T is sweetening the deal with a trio of offers, including 50GB of free AT&T Locker cloud storage for Lumia 1520 buyers and Microsoft's free Halo: Spartan Assassin shooter game on the Windows Phone Store. Speaking of the Windows Phone Store, AT&T customers who purchase and activate their Lumia 1520 between November 22 and January 9, 2014 will receive a $20 voucher good for purchasing apps for the device. AT&T's Lumia 1520 is priced at $199.99 with a two-year agreement and also available via AT&T Next for only $27 per month; the carrier also announced a 32GB model will be offered in the near future. Surf into the big waves with our full review of Apple's new OS X Mavericks!http://rss.feedsportal.com/c/669/f/415085/s/3377e13e/sc/5/mf.gifhttp://res3.feedsportal.com/social/twitter.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/facebook.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/linkedin.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/googleplus.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/email.png http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180263800847/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3377e13e/sc/5/rc/1/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180263800847/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3377e13e/sc/5/rc/2/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180263800847/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3377e13e/sc/5/rc/3/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180263800847/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3377e13e/a2.imghttp://pi.feedsportal.com/r/180263800847/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/3377e13e/a2t.imghttp://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techradar/software-news/~4/tEXTrqoe81w

http://cdn.mos.techradar.com//art/other/Onetimers/google-chrome-browse-extensions-hosted-policy-470-75.jpgThere will only be one place for Windows-based Chrome browser extensions to be stored in 2014, as Google is about to require all such extensions be hosted on the Chrome Web Store. This isn't another Google-Microsoft app tiff. Malicious extensions are the reason developers are being forced to migrate all of their extensions to Google's internal servers starting in January. "Many services bundle useful companion extensions, which causes Chrome to ask whether you want to install them (or not)," explained Erik Kay, Google engineering director, in an official blog post today. "However, bad actors have abused this mechanism, bypassing the prompt to silently install malicious extensions that override browser settings and alter the user experience in undesired ways." One example that Google highlighted involved replacing the New Tab Page without users' approval. The company even linked to hundreds of complaints from Windows users to back this up. You shouldn't see a differenceChrome users shouldn't see much of a change despite the sweeping new security efforts announced today. "There will be no impact to your users, who will still be able to use your extension as if nothing changed," Kay advised developers. He also mentioned that developers who want to keep extensions hidden from the Web Store can do so, in case they're used internally in a work group and shouldn't be shared with the public. The only difference end-users will see is if developers don't migrate over to being hosted on the Chrome Web Store right away. "If your extensions are currently hosted outside the Chrome Web Store you should migrate them as soon as possible," he warned before segueing into the overall goal of this trade-off. "Protecting our users is a key priority, and we believe this change will help those whose browser has been compromised by unwanted extensions." http://rss.feedsportal.com/c/669/f/415085/s/336e5c3c/sc/21/mf.gifhttp://res3.feedsportal.com/social/twitter.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/facebook.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/linkedin.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/googleplus.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/email.png http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180263846515/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/336e5c3c/sc/21/rc/1/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180263846515/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/336e5c3c/sc/21/rc/2/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180263846515/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/336e5c3c/sc/21/rc/3/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180263846515/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/336e5c3c/a2.imghttp://pi.feedsportal.com/r/180263846515/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/336e5c3c/a2t.imghttp://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techradar/software-news/~4/8sS2MG6Fmq0

http://cdn.mos.techradar.com//art/internet/IE11%20preview/ie11-windows-7-demo-470-75.jpgThe latest version of Internet Explorer 11 is finally being ported from Windows 8.1 to Windows 7. Since September 18, IE 11 has been available to gamers and start button purists holding onto Windows 7 as a Release Preview, but now everyone can download the newly finalized build of Microsoft's internet browser. The IE 11 build coming to Windows 7 is almost the same as what comes with the recently shipped Windows 8.1. It features the same speed improvements, enhanced web security measures and interface updates as its newer counterpart. The update also includes Microsoft's F12 developer tools and support for touch gestures, as well as Microsoft's new clutter-free Reading View for Internet Explorer What's under the hood?According to the Redmond company, users switching over from IE10 will see a 9% performance increase on version 11. Microsoft has also previously claimed IE11 as the fastest desktop browser in the world at 30% quicker than competitors like Safari and Chrome. Microsoft-produced numbers aside, IE11 brings some serious browser upgrades to the four-year-old OS. The real reason behind the browser's faster speed is the Flip Ahead feature, which preloads up to two pages if you're reading a multipage story. The other major new addition is Microsoft has finally supported WebGL on Windows 7. If you tdon't know what WebGL is, it makes image filled webpages load faster using GPU hardware acceleration whilst using less memory. It also supports HTML5 link pre-fetching and pre-rendering. The top URL bar remains an aesthetic miss on Windows 7 where it can be found on the bottom in Windows 8.1. The ported browser also does not have the new tab view, and IE 11 doesn't support Google's SPDY protocol (the precursor to HTTP 2.0) on Windows 7 or the newer OS. Google says you can't sell your Glass, but can't really do anything if you do.http://rss.feedsportal.com/c/669/f/415085/s/336e5c43/sc/5/mf.gifhttp://res3.feedsportal.com/social/twitter.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/facebook.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/linkedin.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/googleplus.png http://res3.feedsportal.com/social/email.png http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180263846513/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/336e5c43/sc/5/rc/1/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180263846513/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/336e5c43/sc/5/rc/2/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180263846513/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/336e5c43/sc/5/rc/3/rc.img http://da.feedsportal.com/r/180263846513/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/336e5c43/a2.imghttp://pi.feedsportal.com/r/180263846513/u/49/f/415085/c/669/s/336e5c43/a2t.imghttp://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techradar/software-news/~4/5xzAPgLz3UA