Apple has confirmed that its new operating system, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, will be released on 28 August.
Snow Leopard is one of Apple’s biggest operating system updates since the firm moved from the “Classic” OS in 2001.
Apple said the new operating system (OS) is almost half the size of previous versions, freeing up to 7GB of drive space once installed.
Snow Leopard is currently the number two best seller on Amazon.com and will retail at £25 in the UK ($29 in US).
The release had been slated for September but the firm announced the revised release date on Monday.
The new version updates on the old 10.5.8 Leopard OS and Apple say that its “support for 64-bit processors makes use of large amounts of RAM, increases performance and improves security while remaining compatible with 32-bit applications”.
“Snow Leopard builds on our most successful operating system ever and we’re happy to get it to users earlier than expected,” said Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering.
Apple’s main thrust has been on improving the OS performance, rather than creating new features for the user.
The OS will also come with built-in support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 that Apple says will allow users to employ Snow Leopard’s mail, contacts, and calendar applications while accessing Windows-based network services.
You have your brand new shiny PC an the next thing is to connect it to the Internet, how do you go about it? Usually your PC come with some Internet services provider software bundled with it, the most popular ISP on the desktop from brand new computers is AOL, if you do not want to use AOL as you internet service provider, what options do you have?
The list below is not exhaustive but it contains pretty much most of the major boradband providers in UK and some in Ireland:
BT Total Broadband
High speed (up to8Mb/s) ADSL Broadband Internet for home.
AOL Broadband
Broadband and dial up internet packages.
NTL Broadband
TalkTalk Broadband
Telewest Broadband
OnSPEED Broadband Alternative
Bulldog Broadband
Virgin Broadband
Tiscali
AAISP
Abel Internet
High Speed Broadband Internet Access
ADSL-Now
Advance Internet
Albion
Allcomm
AltoHiway
Atlas Internet
BISCit
BoltBlueClara.NET
Community Internet
DataComms
DataNet
Demon
Easynet
Eclipse Internet
EFH Broadband
Entanet
Freedom 2 Surf
The remaining list of UK broadband provider will be continued in part two. Meanwhile here are some useful urls. You can compare broadband at this one, to find out broadband speed test you need that one. And if you need to compare prices this is your option.
The PC industry will see a decline of nearly 12% in 2009, analysts predict.
It would be only the second period of negative growth in the industry, after a slump of 3.2% in 2002.
The news follows an announcement that the semiconductor industry saw a 35% drop in sales of computer chips between 2008 and 2009.
However, analysts say the chip industry will weather the global economic storm better and rebound faster than the rest of the technology sector.
“The outside economic situation that we’ve seen deteriorating over the last few quarters is now directly affecting the PC market and we’re going to see growth slump over the next year,” said Ranjit Atwal, principal research analyst at Gartner.
The shift in the health of the market was a sharp one. European PC sales were at 20% in the third quarter of 2008; the fourth quarter saw a dive to just 4%.
In 2009, Gartner predicts, those numbers will plummet into the negative. They say that the global market will see 257 million PCs sold in 2009, a downward slide of 11.9% on 2008.
The market dive that occurred in 2001-2002, Mr Atwal said, was primarily from the corporate side of the market.
This time, both individuals and businesses are predicted to buy less PCs, hanging on to ageing computers for longer as part of general belt-tightening.
“The PC market is much more mature [as compared to 2002], and the PC is relatively more important to consumers,” Mr Atwal said.
“But nevertheless, it’s still a luxury item, it hasn’t gone all the way
“That means if your PC slows down, doesn’t work well, doesn’t do what you think it should do, you’ll live with it.”
Some facets of the PC industry are clearly on the up – such as mini-laptops and netbooks, which are projected to ship 80% more units in 2009 than 2008.
However, with just 8% of the overall market share they can’t make up for the slide of the PC industry as a whole.
Weather storm
The semiconductor industry is also facing negative growth: from the third to fourth quarters of 2008, the industry slumped by nearly a quarter.
About Author: The article is submitted by guest author. He provides some useful computer optimization tips on his blog. You can fix speed of your computer by downloading best registry cleaner available online.
read full story here: news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7918621 .stm
Most of us do a considerable amount of our shopping online this days. In the early days of ecommerce, we only buy things like books and CD online, this days, you can plan a meal, go to the website or your favorite supermarket and order all the ingredients you need for the meal and have it delivered to your door, so you can do you weekly shopping without leaving your PC.
Most companies have their ecommerce system developed for them in house, such ecommerce software cost thousands of pounds, a young company is bringing the ecommerce facility only large organisations can boast of to the reach of small to medium sized company with a search engine friendly shopping cart software called Boss Cart.
Boss Cart was designed by web hosting, SEO and web development experts with combined experience of over twenty years in the industry. They were guided by experience online retailers who has been selling online for years hence have the inside knowledge of what a good ecommerce shopping cart system should look and work like.
Amongst other relevant features, Boss Cart boast of the following features:
- Drag and drop interface for quick access to products and product attributes.
- Extended product image upload, add additional seven images per product.
- Define header and footer for each product category and sub category.
- Create links to external URLs.
- Specify shipping and weight for each product.
- Import data to or export data from Boss Cart in CSV format.
- Automatic email confirmation of orders.
- Powerful product search feature.
- Built in Contents Management System (CMS).
You can see the full list of Boss Cart features at the premium shopping cart page.
Boss Cart is not just for retailers, web hosting companies, web designers and resellers can buy the reseller shopping cart version of Boss Cart at about 50% of the cost its sold directly to end users.
