ICTmagazine

While Microsoft spent $8.7 billion on research development in 2009, Apple spent only $1.7 billion. Additionally, Apple spent $5.5 billion on sales, marketing, and general and administrative expenses in 2009, while Microsoft spent $17 billion. Despite spending more money, however, Microsoft had smaller sales and vastly slower growth.

ICTmagazine 1 Initialize a new battery.  New batteries should be fully charged before their first use to obtain maximum capacity. Nickel-based batteries should be charged for 16 hours initially and run through 2-4 full charge/full discharge cycles, while lithium ion batteries should be charged for about 5-6 hours. Ignore the phone telling you that the battery is full—this is normal but is not accurate if the battery is not initialized. 2 Avoid fully discharging a lithium-ion battery!  Unlike Ni-Cd batteries, lithium-ion batteries' life is shortened every time you fully discharge them. Instead, charge them when the battery meter shows one bar left. Lithium-ion batteries, like most rechargeable batteries, have a set number of charges in them. 3 Keep the battery cool.  Put the battery in the fridge. Your battery will last longest if used near room temperature, and nothing wears on a battery like extended exposure to high temperatures. While yo...

After what seems to have been the longest beta period ever, Google has finally graduated Gmail’s “Undo Send” option from labs into a permanent spot. When you enable Undo Send, you’re able to “unsend” an email up to ten seconds after you hit the send button — Gmail just delays sending briefly so you have a moment in case you change your mind. You’d be surprised how often I’ve caught a typo just as I send an email, so the feature is a lifesaver for me. The feature has lived in Gmail’s “Labs” area, which the company uses to test out new features, since March 2009 Undo Send now lives in Gmail’s settings under the “General” tab. It’s disabled by default, but it’s worth turning on if you haven’t already. Credits: The Next Web

While many of us now use mobile phones instead of land lines phones in our homes, many of such devices comes with Lithium ion batteries which requires maintenence  as long as they are used. 1 Turn the phone off.  Note: only do this if it's going to be for several hours; turning a phone on/off actually uses a massive amount of power itself. This will probably be the most effective and simple way of conserving your battery’s power. Why? This will help conserve energy and also charge your phone. If you don't plan on answering the phone while you're sleeping or after business hours, just turn it off. Do the same if you are in an area with no reception (such as a subway or remote area, since constantly searching for service depletes the battery fairly quickly.) Some phones have an automatic power save feature, but it takes about 30 minutes with no service to kick in. By then, much battery power has been used. If you don't need to receive or make calls but are us...

In an ironic twist of fate, security firm Kaspersky on Wednesday announced that it was hacked. "The bad news is that we discovered an advanced attack on our own internal networks," the company's chairman and CEO, Eugene Kaspersky, wrote in a   blog post . "It was complex, stealthy, it exploited several zero-day vulnerabilities, and we're quite confident that there's a nation state behind it. We've called it Duqu 2.0." Kaspersky said the attackers—believed to be the same group behind  2011's Stuxnet-like Duqu worm —were mainly interested in spying on its technologies, especially its solutions for discovering and analyzing sophisticated attacks known as Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). The attackers were looking to find out about Kaspersky's ongoing investigations into advanced attacks, detection methods, and analysis capabilities. Apparently, they weren't all that successful. Kaspersky said that none of its products or s...

Facebook 'Unfriend Alert' app notifies you whenever someone removes you from their Facebook friend list. Be careful while downloading apps as some of them may steal your data, say experts. Recently, an app, Unfriend Alert – that alerts you when someone “unfriends” you on Facebook – has been found to be collecting users’ Facebook data, Betanews.com reported. The app is free and notifies you whenever someone removes you from the Facebook friend list. But it asks for your login credentials. “Looking at a Wireshark log for this check however shows that the login credentials are not sent directly to Facebook but to yougotunfriended.com,” security firm MalwareBytes said. The app also displays ads and can install malicious software on the user’s computer. What’s more worrisome is that it doesn’t show up in the apps list on Facebook. So you can easily forget that it is there and monitoring your activities. Expert recommend removing the app and changing your passwor...

Until now, getting Windows 8 / 8.1 onto a computer hasn’t been the easiest thing in the world, if only because you couldn’t use a Windows 8 product key to install Windows 8.1 afresh or even choose the architecture to be installed. Instead, if you had 32-bit Windows 8 installed during setup you’d end up with the 32-bit version of Windows 8.1, too. There were other niggling issues too, but Microsoft has quietly made available a tool that goes quite a long way towards rectifying a good few of hose issues. Called the Windows Installation Media Creation Tool, the app can be downloaded and can be used to create either an ISO or a bootable USB stick in order to get Windows onto a machine. It’s not rocket science these days, but here’s how you would go about downloading and installing Windows 8.1 now this wonderful little utility is around. Step 1: Head on over to the installation media webpage  here  and download the small app that is needed in order to kick this all off. Cli...