Windows 8.1 Update 1 does keyboard and mouse proud

Deploying Windows 8.1 with Update 1 makes more sense for business machines with no touch screen
The latest release of Windows 8.1 adds new mouse and keyboard controls plus other features that make it a much better choice for businesses that don’t want to spring for touch-screen computers and whose end users crave the familiarity of traditional Windows navigation. There are a string of small changes that make the operating system much friendlier to those used to Windows 7 or something earlier. Here are a few of these new features.

More apps on the Desktop taskbar
One thing mouse-and-keyboard users miss a lot in Windows 8.1 is use of the traditional Desktop view and all its functionality. Here you see the newly updated Desktop. Note the aqua mountain-skyline with sun icon in the taskbar, which denotes the Photo app. It is a Metro app (now known as a Windows Store app), and in the previous version of Windows 8.1 such apps could not be pinned to the task bar. Now they can, making them easier to find for traditional Windows users who use the Desktop as their center of operations. The taskbar displays both pinned apps and all open apps.

Power button on the Start screen
Turning off Windows 8.1 PCs has been more complicated than it needs to be – click to reveal the charms bar, click to choose power, and click to choose Shut Down. Now with the latest update on the Windows Start screen there’s a power button. Click on it and choose Shut Down. This eliminates one step and makes it easier for anyone looking for the power button to find it.

Search icon on the Start screen
Searching a Windows 8.1 computer requires simply typing the search query while the Start screen is displayed, but this isn’t intuitive to traditional desktop users. To help them out, Microsoft has added the magnifying-glass search icon to the start page. (You can see it in the previous slide.) Right clicking on it reveals the Search window as shown in this screen capture.

Hidden title bar
A title bar and an X-to-close button appear at the top of the screen in Windows Store apps when the cursor is moved off the top edge of the display. They look much as they do in traditional desktop apps. Clicking on the X button closes the app; right clicking on the icon in the upper left reveals options to split the screen with another app on either the left or right half of the screen, minimizing the app or closing it. Similarly, the taskbar jumps up when the cursor runs off the bottom of the screen.

Dialog box to modify tiles
Right clicking on application tiles as they appear on the Start screen reveals a dialog box with options including pinning or unpinning the app, uninstalling it or changing the properties of the tile itself. All these functions are possible using touch commands or left-mouse clicks, but they’re neither obvious nor intuitive to keyboard and mouse users new to Windows 8.1.

Popup for essential device info
Date, time, battery life and network connectivity are all standard parts of the traditional Windows Desktop, but were lacking on the Windows 8.1 Start screen. In fact there was no simple way to gather all that information. With Windows 8.1 Update 1 this information appears to the left on the Start screen whenever the hidden charms bar is exposed by running the mouse into the upper or lower right-hand corners.

Boot to desktop
If the machine running Windows 8.1 Update 1 doesn’t have a touch screen, it will automatically boot to the Desktop, so no more having to click in the bottom left corner or finding the Desktop tile to click on.

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Beyond the usual suspects: 10 hot programming languages on the rise

From Ceylon to Egison, these 10 languages tackle tough programming problems in unique and increasingly popular ways

Beyond the usual suspects: 10 programming languages on the rise
The sheer number and diversity of programming languages in use today is immense. For better or worse, however, most organizations settle on a small subset, the usual suspects, to tackle whatever programming problem comes their way. Java, C++, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby -- time and again, developers shoehorn code to do the best they can with the tried and true.

Some problems require new approaches and new tools. Here are 10 programming languages gaining significant traction for newfound, newly created, or reimagined utility. They run the gamut from general purpose to highly specific, and have roots that range from Lisp to Java, but each could have meaningful impact on modern programming as it evolves.

Ceylon 1.0.0
Resembles: Java (but it isn't a version of it)
License: Apache v2
What's it all about: Once upon a time developers at Red Hat got together and said, "Man, Java would be great if only it didn't do this, and if only it did do that." Several wish lists later, Ceylon was born. The language runs on the JVM and Node.js, while doing away with many of Java's more notorious pain points. Instead of XML, it uses a JSON-like declarative syntax for tree-structured data, and it features static typing, a module system, and support for some structures that don't exist in Java, such as sequence, intersection, and union types.

Clojure 1.6
Resembles: Lisp
License: Eclipse Public License 1.0
What's it all about: One way to think about Clojure is that it's Lisp for the JVM, given that it runs on the JVM and has full access to Java's frameworks and libraries. Clojure's creators advertise the language as a tool for functional programming that is also designed for concurrency -- in other words, well-suited to multicore or widely distributed applications. InfoWorld's Andy Oliver looked at Clojure in the context of Ruby and Ceylon, and he felt it best suited for programmers coming from a math or science background. But with the functional programming paradigm on the rise, Clojure deserves a closer look beyond computational science.

Egison 3.3.3
Resembles: Lisp
License: MIT
What's it all about: Egison is a functional language aimed at performing pattern matches against a range of data types. Egison's creator, Satoshi Egi, claims that pattern matching in existing programming languages is supported only when the data is stored in a structured form like a list. Egison was designed to allow pattern matches to be expressed in different ways based on data types (for lists vs. sets); to handle nonlinear patterns, such as multiple occurrences of the same variable in a pattern; and to create functions that both receive and return patterns.

Groovy 2.2
Resembles: Java
License: Apache License 2.0
What's it all about: Call it "Java plus," since Groovy is essentially a syntactical extension of Java that runs on the JVM and can make use of Java library classes. But Groovy bristles with features not found in Java natively: static and dynamic typing, mainly, but also operator overloading, native regular expression support, and -- my favorite -- a "?" operator to allow for the safe checking of null objects without wrapping expressions in tons of syntactic sugar. It's also found uptake with some fairly big names: LinkedIn and Wired have used Groovy (and Grails, a Groovy Web framework) for their websites, and major IDEs like Eclipse and IntelliJ now support it.

Hack 1.0
Resembles: PHP
License: PHP/Zend licenses
What's it all about: Facebook had already created its own runtime for PHP, known as HHVM -- so why not go a step further and fork PHP itself? Hack, Facebook's new spin-off language, keeps PHP's rapid development cycle and ease of use, adds static object typing and lambda expressions, and was written in OCaml for safety and durability. Much existing PHP code will run in Hack, making it theoretically easier to migrate from PHP to Hack, but right now, outside of Facebook's own bullpens, it's hard to say if Hack will enjoy the kind of massive uptake PHP has enjoyed.

Jeeves
Resembles: ML, but implemented directly in Scala and Python
License: MIT
What's it all about: Jeeves was created to help programmers do one thing: enforce privacy policies for how data moves through an application. As explained in the readme for the Python implementation of the language, this goes beyond ascertaining whether a given user can see a value to determining whether that user can see values derived from that value. Policies for how such data flows are created and managed separately from the program itself. Given how important data security has become as a matter of programming practice, projects such as Jeeves may be receiving a good deal more attention in the future.

Julia 0.2.1
Resembles: Python
License: MIT
What's it all about: Julia was designed for technical and scientific computing, where parallelized and distributed number-crunching is a way of life. Julia compiles to machine code with the aid of an LLVM-based compiler, and on some key benchmarks it outperforms Matlab, Mathematica, and R -- which were also developed for math and science work -- by a wide margin. It even supports a Lisp-like macro function for expanding the functionality of the language. Also, existing fans of Python's math and science libraries need not feel shut out, since Julia can optionally make use of those libraries as well.

Nimrod 0.9.2
Resembles: Python, Pascal
License: MIT
What's it all about: The Nimrod homepage describes the language as "a statically typed, imperative programming language that tries to give the programmer ultimate power without compromises on runtime efficiency." Nimrod compiles down to C (with C++ and Objective-C as options) and does not need a virtual machine or runtime. Its creator intends for it to be used for systems programming, because it can access hardware directly and has pointers to both garbage-collected and manually managed memory. The language also lets the user define operators and macros, and bindings have been written for many popular libraries and third-party applications: Windows and POSIX APIs, GTK2, OpenGL, and so on.

OCaml 4.01
Resembles: The ML theorem-proving language, and to some degree Lisp
License: Q Public License
What's it all about: Most programming languages generally tend to fall into one of three buckets: functional (Lisp), imperative (C), or object-oriented (Java). OCaml does all of those things, and some recent OCaml projects have made waves, including Hack (Facebook's recent fork of PHP, mentioned previously) and the Xen Project's Mirage OS. Its statically typed design may not win over those solidly invested in the dynamic-typing camp, but one sign of how seriously it's worth taking is how other languages are now beginning to arise in its wake as well: Microsoft's F#, for instance.

Racket 6.0
Resembles: Lisp, Scheme
License: LGPL
What's it all about: A variant of Scheme, which itself is a variant of Lisp, Racket was designed to be powerful enough for creating languages, but also straightforward and robust enough to be used for traditional application programming -- Naughty Dog uses it for scripting in several of its games, and the Hacker News website was developed using Scheme. Unlike other Lisp-like languages, Scheme's macro system includes the compiler itself, so features can be added to the language as if they were native Racket constructions.

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Go time traveling with Google Maps

Google adds new time machine feature to let users see older images of favorite places, buildings

Google is giving users something of a time machine in a new feature on Maps.

The company is adding past images of places noted in Street View for the desktop version of Google Maps. The goal is to give users the ability to see how places have changed over time.

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"We've gathered historical imagery from past Street View collections dating back to 2007 to create this digital time capsule of the world," wrote Vinay Shet, Google's Street View product manager, in a blog post. "Now with Street View, you can see a landmark's growth from the ground up, like the Freedom Tower in New York City or the 2014 World Cup Stadium in Fortaleza, Brazil."

With Google's new time machine-like feature in Maps, users can follow the construction of the Freedom Tower in New York City. (Photo: Google)

Google also says the new feature can serve as a digital timeline of recent history, enabling users to follow the reconstruction underway in Japan after the devastating tsunami and earthquake in 2011.

Users also can use the new feature to see what cities would look like in different seasons. Looking to take a bike tour of the French countryside or the green mountains of Vermont? Now users can get a glimpse of them at different times of the year to help them decide when to go.

The feature is gradually being rolled out to users. Users will know if the feature is available if they see a clock icon in the upper left-hand portion of a Street View image. They can click on it and move the slider through time and select a thumbnail to see that same place in previous years or seasons, Shet said.

Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with ZK Research, said Maps' new feature is "cute" but doesn't offer much benefit to most users.

"It's just a gimmick," Kerravala said. "They're only going back six years so that's not a huge amount of time. Real estate firms, law firms, etc. may have some use, but otherwise I don't believe it's all that sticky of an application."

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Browser Security: Most Effective Browsers Against Socially Engineered Malware

NSS Labs recently released the results and analysis from its latest Browser Security Comparative Analysis Report, which evaluated the ability of eight leading browsers -- Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Kingsoft Liebao, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Qihoo 360 Safe Browser, and Sogou Explorer -- to block against socially engineered malware (SEM). The use of social engineering to distribute malware continues to account for the bulk of cyber attacks against both consumers and enterprises, thereby making a browser's ability to protect against these kinds of attacks an important criterion for personal or corporate use.

Microsoft Internet Explorer continues to outperform other browsers. With an average block rate of 99.9 percent, the highest zero-hour block rate, fastest average time to block, and highest consistency of protection over time percentages, Internet Explorer leads in all key test areas.

Google Chrome remained in the top three, but its average block rate fell significantly to 70.7 percent, down from 83.17 percent in the previous test.

Cloud-based endpoint protection (EPP) file scanning provides substantial defenses when integrated with the browser. Kingsoft Liebao browser utilizes the same cloud-based file scanning system used by Kingsoft antivirus and had the second highest overall block rate at 85.1 percent, ahead of Chrome by almost 15 percentage points.

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Google's Safe Browsing API does not provide adequate SEM protection. Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox both utilize the Google Safe Browsing API and were the two lowest performing browsers in this latest test. Both also saw significant drops of around 6 percent in their average block rates -- Safari from 10.15 percent to 4.1 percent and Firefox from 9.92 percent to 4.2 percent.

Chinese browsers tested for the first time prove viable. This year, three browsers from China were included in testing for the first time, and Kingsoft's Liebao browser jumped ahead of Google Chrome with an overall protection rate of 85.1 percent. Sogou Explorer had the fourth highest average block rate at 60.1 percent.

Commentary: NSS Labs Research Director Randy Abrams
"Selecting a browser with robust socially engineered malware protection is one of the most critical choices consumers and enterprises can make to protect themselves. Microsoft's SmartScreen Application Reputation technology continues to provide Internet Explorer the most effective protection against socially engineered malware," said Randy Abrams, Research Director at NSS Labs. "This year NSS added three browsers from China. The Kingsoft Liebao browser displaced Chrome from second place by using a combination of URL filtering with the cloud-based file scanning technology that Kingsoft uses for their antivirus product. Sogou Explorer, another browser from China, was the only other tested browser to exceed 50 percent protection against socially engineered malware. Firefox and Safari failed to achieve five percent effectiveness and leave less technical users at considerable risk."

NSS Labs recommendations
Learn to identify social engineering attacks in order to maximize protection against SEM and other social engineering attacks.
Use caution when sharing links from friends and other trusted contacts, such as banks. Waiting just one day before clicking on a link can significantly reduce risk.
Enterprises should review current security reports when selecting a browser. Do not assume the browser market is static.

Microsoft’s mobile moves: Still your father’s technology company

Microsoft created a virtual assistant, made Windows free on small devices, and brought back the Start button – but it’s still playing catch-up

This has been a big week for Microsoft, with a flood of new announcements and changes of direction. Along with its Build conference, new CEO Satya Nadella has made a number of moves designed to reverse the public perception that the company is an aging also ran in the technology races.

The changes include
Rolling out its new Cortana digital voice assistant
Announcing that Windows would be free to manufacturers of devices with small screens
Coming out with "universal" Windows technology that helps developers build apps that run on multiple versions of Microsoft's operating system
Reviving the popular "Start" menu for Windows 8.1

Though some of those moves are more important than others, they're all good things. Unfortunately, I don't think they'll be enough to solve Microsoft's problem of being seen as your father's technology vendor. Here's why:

Consumers vs. IT
As noted above, Microsoft's issues right now revolve around how the company is perceived by consumers, and it's unlikely that these initiatives will be enough to change those perceptions. While all useful, none of them are truly new. Instead, they're playing catch-up to existing products and services from Microsoft's competitors, perhaps with incremental improvements, or acknowledgements that previous Microsoft strategies simply weren't working out.

Technology professionals will welcome these changes, but the IT community isn't where Microsoft's problems lie. In my experience,, enterprise IT generally likes and trusts the company. Microsoft's challenges lie in convincing fickle consumers that it's as cool and innovative as Apple and Google. I can't imagine these moves being exciting enough to do that.

Better, but not better enough
While initial reports suggest that Cortana is a credible or even superior alternative to Apple's Siri and Google Now, the fact remains that other companies pioneered the voice assistant idea. Cortana would have to be light-years better than its already-in-place rivals to truly give Microsoft a significant advantage.

Similarly, making Windows free for mobile devices may help spark more device makers to adopt the platform, but it's not like it will make an immediate difference to consumers. Besides, Android is already free to license. Once again, Microsoft is playing catch up.

Universal Windows app development may pay off with more app choices in the long run, but it's a pretty geeky concept for most end users. Finally, bringing back the Start menu will ease the transition to Windows 8 for some holdouts, but let's face it, the cool kids aren't really interested in desktop Windows at this point.

Put it all together and you've got a collection of tweaks and that could change the substance of what Microsoft does, but won't dent the way most people think of the company.

More, please!
Still, there's a big ray of hope here. The fact that Microsoft was willing and able to make these changes could signal that more are on the way. If Microsoft can keep shaking things up and continue to show that things really are different now, eventually people will begin to notice and perhaps change their minds about the company. And then it truly won't be your father's Microsoft any more.

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