NewsGator has upgraded its Social Sites enterprise social networking (ESN) add-on for SharePoint to make the software better able to tailor the content, notifications and capabilities it displays for each user.

The overall goal is to make it easier for Social Sites users to stay engaged with work tasks, information and colleagues.

ESN software, which adapts social media features for workplace use, is seen to fail when employees view it as yet another separate "inbox" that they need to check. When this happens, the ESN system becomes a deserted island.

Thus, NewsGator and other ESN vendors consider it a priority to make sure their software is threaded into the business applications and processes that employees use daily.

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Sprint Nextel sued Clearwire and Dish Network on Monday in a bid to block Dish from taking over Clearwire, Sprint's majority-owned network partner.

Dish and Sprint have been in a bidding war over Clearwire, which Sprint also plans to buy, and last week Clearwire's board recommended shareholders accept Dish's offer. But in a complaint filed in the Delaware Court of Chancery on Monday, Sprint said Dish's proposal violates its rights and those of other strategic investors. In its suit, Sprint wants to prevent the deal from being consummated and seeks unspecified damages.

Sprint co-founded Clearwire along with several strategic partners in 2008 to build out a WiMax network to carry its first 4G service. It still owns a majority of Clearwire's stock and is seeking to buy out the rest of the company in order to build a strong LTE network to take on its larger rivals. Because of Clearwire's massive spectrum holdings, the fate of that company is expected to play a key role in the complicated takeover battle among Dish, SoftBank and Sprint. A lawsuit over Dish's Clearwire bid had been widely expected.

Dish is also seeking to buy out Clearwire, but in its last bid the satellite TV and Internet provider said it would be willing to buy a minority stake as long as it got certain rights, such as being able to name three board members and approve material transactions with third parties.

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Lean storage techniques will keep a lid on storage investments over the next few years, though the world's enterprises still are on track to buy 138 exabytes of storage system capacity in 2017, IDC said.

Annual sales of storage capacity will grow by more than 30 percent every year between 2013 and 2017, according to a forecast the research company announced on Monday. But that growth will be slower than the steep pace recorded a few years ago because organizations have adopted ways of using storage more efficiently, including cloud storage services, IDC analyst Natalya Yezhkova said.

Data deduplication, data compression, thin provisioning and storage virtualization all will help enterprises limit their purchases of new storage capacity, Yezhkova said. Those techniques can reduce the amount of space consumed by a given bit of information or help companies allocate new storage as needed instead of overbuying.

IDC estimates more than 102 exabytes of external and 36 exabytes of internal storage system capacity will be sold in 2017, up from just 20 exabytes of external and 8 exabytes of internal capacity in 2012. External storage sits outside of servers, while internal goes inside them.

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Apple didn't try to fix or raise the prices of electronic books when it entered into the market in 2010, according to Apple Senior Vice President Eddy Cue. Rather, he says, the company was only working to ensure a profit for itself.

"We're not willing to lose money in any business," Cue told the court, referring to Amazon's practice of 2009 to sell electronic books for less than what it paid for them.

But in doing so, the U.S. Justice Department contends, Apple violated antitrust laws by colluding with the five largest book publishers -- HarperCollins, the Penguin Group, the Hatchett Group, MacMillan, and Simon & Schuster -- to fix the prices of electronic books. As a result of their actions, the prices of electronic books rose in 2010, the DOJ contended.

While the five publishers have since settled with the DOJ out of court, Apple is defending its practices in a DOJ antitrust trial now under way at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District Court of New York, with District Judge Denise Cote presiding.

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Microsoft said Monday that it is eliminating the ability to link accounts within Outlook.com, replacing them with aliases instead.

Currently, Outlook users can link their account with others from within Outlook.com. Outlook allows users to not only read email from within the Outlook.com context, but also send emails as if they were in those other domains.

Now, according to Microsoft, those Microsoft accounts will be unlinked, and made inaccessible to Outlook.com. In the near term, Microsoft will begin unlinking those previously linked accounts. Instead, Microsoft has proposed an alternative: using Outlook.com aliases instead.

What’s the difference between an alias and a dedicated email address? An alias can provide anonymity for users, without being tied to an actual account. Let’s say that one owned the email address foo@outlook.com. Using the alias feature that Microsoft pushed to the public in 2011, one could set up IamJoeSmithZ@outlook.com, hand that email out to the public, and receive email sent to that address. As an alias, IamJoeSmithZ@outlook.com wouldn’t require a dedicated password; if that address was set up as a second, linked account, it would.

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Much of Rambus’ past is associated with lawsuits, but the company is moving forward with dispute settlements.

After years of litigation, Rambus and STMicroelectronics said Monday they had signed an agreement that settled all their legal disputes. The agreement came just a few days after Rambus settled a 13-year-old legal dispute with SK Hynix.

Monday’s comprehensive agreement will settle outstanding claims and expand existing licenses, STMicroelectronics and Rambus said in separate statements.

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Many attempts have been made over the last 46 years to rewrite Amdahl’s law, a theory that focuses on performance relative to parallel and serial computing. One scientist hopes to prove that Amdahl’s law can be surpassed, and that it doesn’t apply in certain parallel computing models.

A presentation titled “Breaking the Law” at the International Supercomputing Conference this week in Leipzig, Germany, will show how “pitfalls of Amdahl’s law can be avoided in specific situations,” according to a blog entry that provides a teaser on the presentation.

The presentation will “challenge Amdahl’s generalized law by exposing it to a new class of experiments in parallel computing,” wrote Thomas Lippert, director of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre at Jülich, Germany, in the blog entry. Lippert will lead the presentation.

What is Amdahl's law?

Amdahl’s law, established in 1967 by noted computer scientist Gene Amdahl when he was with IBM, provides an understanding on scaling, limitations and economics of parallel computing based on certain models. The theory states that computational tasks can be decomposed into portions that are parallel, which helps execute tasks and solve problems quicker. However, the speed of task execution is limited by tasks—in the case of computers it could be serial tasks—that cannot be parallelized.

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Many eyes in the tech world will fall on Oracle later this week, when the vendor’s fourth-quarter results are set for release. This is typically the biggest reporting period for Oracle each year in terms of revenue, but a number of questions loom beyond its top-line performance.

Here’s a look at some of the topics Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and other executives may discuss or be asked to address during Thursday’s conference call on the results.

New software purchases versus maintenance

Oracle has consistently made sure to highlight its strong software maintenance revenue, which existing customers pay each year for support and updates. Maintenance fees carry extremely high profit margins for Oracle and other software vendors.

But another key metric to watch is new software license revenue. Growth in this area says customers are broadening their investments in Oracle software, whether by adding licenses for their existing implementation or trying out newer products.

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Analysts at the National Security Agency can gain access to the content of U.S. targets’ phone calls and email messages without court orders, NSA leaker Edward Snowden said, contradicting denials from U.S. government sources.

U.S. surveillance agencies have weak policy protections in place to protect U.S. residents, but “policy is a one-way ratchet that only loosens,” Snowden, the former NSA contractor, said in a chat on the Guardian’s website Monday.

The technology filter designed to protect U.S. communications is “constantly out of date, is set at what is euphemistically referred to as the ‘widest allowable aperture,’ and can be stripped out at any time,” Snowden wrote in the chat. “Even with the filter, US comms get ingested, and even more so as soon as they leave the border.”

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In 2012, Microsoft's Rick Rashid blew an Asian audience away with a live translation of his speech into Mandarin. On Monday, Bing added some of that technology to Bing Voice Search, to cut down the processing response time of voice input into Windows Phone by half, while improving accuracy at the same time.

Microsoft said that it is rolling out updates to Windows Phone customers to greatly improve the accuracy of SMS messages that are transcribed using the service, as well as searches performed using voice. The accuracy of those transcriptions has been improved by 15 percent, Microsoft said, while the response time has been halved—from about a second to just about half that. The service also does a a better job of cutting out ambient noise.

"Better results and better latency," Michael Tjalve, a member of the Bing Speech team, said in a video describing the improvements. "So you get better results from the speech recognizer, and you get it faster."

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British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) reportedly intercepted the electronic communications of foreign politicians during G20 meetings that took place in London in 2009.

The agency used a series of techniques to intercept email, steal online login credentials and monitor the phone calls of foreign delegates who attended the meetings, U.K. newspaper The Guardia reported Monday. The G20 represents the top 20 economies of the world.

The newspaper claims that evidence of GCHQ’s surveillance activity at the meetings was present in documents and PowerPoint presentations classified as top secret that were uncovered by Edward Snowden, a former intelligence contractor who recently leaked information about the U.S. National Security Agency’s call metadata and electronic communication collection programs.

According to information from one document, GCHQ and U.K. intelligence service MI6 set up Internet cafes at the G20 meetings in order to extract key logging information and credentials from foreign delegates, giving the agencies “sustained intelligence options” against the targets even after the events ended.

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Interacting with your computer gets a massive upgrade in the Windows 8 world, and it doesn't involve your mouse and keyboard. Here's the complete guide to everything you need to know about using gestures with Windows 8.

Windows 8 features a wholly new way to navigate the operating system. While your keyboard and mouse aren't going away, now you can use intuitive gestures to complete common computing tasks with ease.

You can use gestures whether you have a touchscreen device (like a Windows 8 tablet or a convertible laptop such as the HP Envy TouchSmart Ultrabook™ 4) or a traditional laptop without a touchscreen. In the case of the former, your gestures take the form of taps, slides, and swipes you make while touching the display directly. For non-touchscreen devices, you do the same thing, but on the touchpad instead.

For longtime Windows users, gestures might initially feel a bit strange. But once you start interacting directly with the screen instead of relying solely on your keyboard and mouse, you'll find that gestures quickly become completely natural. In fact, they make Windows so easy to use you'll soon wonder how you got along in Windows without them.

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We interrupt your regularly scheduled Hassle-Free PC post to bring you the Hassle-Free Phone edition.

Trying to decide between, say, an HTC One and a Samsung Galaxy S4. Sure, you can read PC World's awesome reviews, maybe talk to friends and hit some stores for hands-on demos. But ultimately your best bet is to compare them directly, to see their specs, strengths, and weaknesses side by side.

That's what you get at PhoneRocket, a nifty site that compares any two smartphones in exhaustive detail.

Let's use the two aforementioned models as an example. All you do is type the names of the two phones you want to compare. PhoneRocket then gives you a quick summary of each one followed by a "winner" based on various ratings and criteria.

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If, like many, you use Evernote as a sophisticated to-do list, the latest update to the essential software and service is about to dramatically increase its usefulness. Reminders give Evernote a full suite of alarm and notification features, ideal for turning static notes into dynamic action items.

The company calls Reminders its "most requested feature of all time."

Evernote hasn't exactly reinvented the wheel when it comes to its implementation of Reminders. You simply add an optional Reminder to any note by tapping the alarm clock icon that now appears on screen when you're creating or viewing a note.

Reminders do not necessarily have to come with a time and date attached (otherwise they simply appear in the new Reminders area, which I'll discuss in more detail below), but you'll probably want to assign specific deadlines to most of your Reminders. Tap or click the calendar icon to give your Reminder a deadline or other specific timing. This will also give it a pop-up alert when the Reminder comes due.

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China has regained the crown for the fastest supercomputer on the planet, according to the semiannual Top500 list, which claims that the Milky Way-2 supercomputer has doubled the performance of the previous leader, the American "Titan" supercomputer, in just six months.

Milky Way-2, also known as "Tianhe-2," clusters together more than 32,000 Intel Xeon microprocessors as well as more than 48,000 Intel Xeon Phi chips, the server equivalent of a graphics coprocessor. All told, the two groups of chips can crunch the equivalent of 33.86 petaflops of performance, about double that of Titan, housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. A "flop" is a floating point operation, one of the basic metrics of a computer performance; a petaflop is a thousand trillion floating point operations.

High powered computing hot rods

Taken as an abstract measurement, Milky Way-2's high-water-mark isn't that significant. But high performance computers are used for a variety of simulations, including long-term predictive models of earthquakes, how a prototype automobile will perform, predicting the impact of climate change, to trying to assess the destructive power of a nuclear weapon. Generally speaking, the additional performance of a supercomputer means more finely detailed calculations, such as modeling individual particles of air as they pass over a windshield.

In this sense, HPCs are the Formula One versions of the more prosaic and power-efficient servers driving cloud services at Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others. While they're generally owned by governments and research organizations, corporations are also beginning to invest, such as French oil conglomerate Total's investment in a 2.3 petaflop supercomputer to deduce the best locations to drill for oil.

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For many of us, there's nothing more important to do online than check, read, and write emails. Inky is an email desktop client that brings all your email accounts together under one roof. It offers most of the features you're used to, and something different as well.

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As a writer, I find Dragon NaturallySpeaking wonderful. Its time-tested and mature speech recognition engine understands me well, and it can transcribe audio files I record on my phone. But at $100-$200, it's also an expensive piece of software, and no, you can't download a demo. What you can do if you're curious about Dragon's speech recognition is plop down $20 for Dragon Notes, marketed as a smart sticky-note replacement.

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Revelations over the U.S. National Security Agency’s Prism surveillance program have much of the general public in uproar, but in terms of the controversy’s impact to enterprise IT, some CIOs have measured, albeit watchful reactions.

“I don’t see it as a problem for us,” said Mike Zill, CIO of medical-products manufacturer CareFusion. “I don’t see the government doing something to systematically damage our company or any company.”

That said, CareFusion already has multiple “highly secure” systems in the company for protecting highly sensitive information, but those systems don’t cover all of CareFusion’s data and employees, Zill said. “The question is, do we push that to everybody? It’s a question of the economics and the risk-to-reward [quotient].”

Only certain industries may need to worry, according to another IT professional.

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In a recent TekSystems survey, 1,500 IT leaders and 2,400 IT pros were polled on the importance of onboarding. When IT leaders were asked about onboarding's importance, the majority agreed that it's necessary but that many aren't doing it well.

62 percent of IT leaders say an onboarding program is extremely valuable in terms of a new employee.

53 percent agreed that it created better cohesion among their teams.

47 percent agreed that contributed to the long term success within the company.

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Europe's top privacy watchdog and the digital agenda commissioner both said Monday that more transparency and trust is needed between the European Union and the U.S. following reports of widespread data collection by the U.S. National Security Agency.

Cybersecurity is not an excuse for the unlimited monitoring and analysis of the personal information of individuals, said Peter Hustinx, the European data protection supervisor.

"If the E.U. wants to cooperate with other countries, including the U.S.A., on cyber security, it must necessarily be on the basis of mutual trust and respect for fundamental rights, a foundation which currently appears compromised," said Hustinx in a statement, released along with his formal Opinion on the Cyber Security Strategy. His formal opinion must be considered by the European Commission in drawing up legislation.

He went on to criticize the E.U.'s Cyber Security Strategy, which was put forward by the European Commission in February. Hustinx said the strategy is not clear on how data protection principles will be applied in practice and that it fails to take due account of the proposed Data Protection Regulation and the eTrust Regulation.

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Mgentry2 asked the Windows forum to recommend password managers that can " keep track of both online passwords and desktop application passwords (Outlook, Quicken, etc.)."

The safest passwords are long, seemingly random strings of letters, numbers, and punctuation--and you need a different one for each Web site and application. Unless you have a photographic memory, you need a program where you can securely store your passwords. That way, you only need to remember the one password that will give you access to all the others.

You need a password manager, which is essentially an encrypted password database. There's no reason why a good password manager it can't work for Web sites and applications.

[Email your tech questions to answer@pcworld.com or post them on the PCW Answer Line forum.]

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Security monitoring—the type involving traditional security information and event management (SIEM)—can be done in some public cloud environments, according to Gartner. And businesses using public cloud services, it's time to think about doing it.

Security monitoring of assets that the enterprise has placed in cloud is still not a common practice, but it really should be, said Gartner analyst Anton Chuvakin during his presentation last week at the Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit in National Harbor, Maryland. There is always a "loss of control" when turning corporate data assets over to the cloud, Chuvakin says, but "you can compensate by increasing the visibility that comes with collection of logs and network traffic."

Most security monitoring today is done on-premises within the enterprise network using SIEM, intrusion-prevention systems (IPS) and data-loss prevention tools. In Amazon Web Services, he said, it's possible to collect logs and copy them back to the on-premises SIEM.The benefits are that familiar tools are in use and you can obtain a unified view of both the cloud and the traditional environment, he said. On the other hand, there might be bandwidth restraints that make this hard or that the SIEM tools present "conflicts and incompatibilities" in the cloud environment. Chuvakin said enterprise security managers have to ask the question whether their SIEM tool is "cloud-ready" to collect data, which may be presented in unfamiliar form as instances and dynamic provisioning.

Some SIEM tools are able to make use of specific software-as-a-service APIs as well to collect logs from public cloud services. Tools from IBM and HP ArcSight, for example, can now monitor Salesforce, Chuvakin noted.  

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Gemalto, based in Amsterdam, develops digital security systems and network security. Gemalto's solutions sales manager for M2M, Lakhi Baug, talks about how machine-to-machine (M2M) communication systems are used to preserve rainforests and why they are better than traditional satellite surveillance and radio monitoring.

Tell us about machine to machine (M2M) communication systems and how authorities in Brazil are using it to preserve the Amazon rainforest?

To prevent illegal logging in the Amazon, Gemalto and Cargo Tracck have developed a discreet tracking device that uses Gemalto's tiny and powerful Cinterion BGS2 M2M module to enable cellular communications between trees and Brazil's law enforcement agencies.

Smaller than a deck of cards for inconspicuous deployment, the tracking device is camouflaged in a resin case that is made to blend in with tree trunks and installed in remote active harvesting areas deep in the jungle. With a sophisticated power management system that vastly improves power efficiency, the M2M modules in the tracking device can remain active in the field for about a year without being recharged. The devices are also rugged enough to operate reliably in rainforest heat and moisture, while being powerful enough to track trees through remote and dense forests.

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A recently published report on potential scenarios of cyber-conflict, The Global Cyber-Game, says it is inevitable that the Internet will be "militarized"—used to serve the needs of military conflict between nations—and that ICT will increasingly be both an important means and a target of such conflict.

Published as the result of a lengthy study by the UK's Defense Academy—the educational and academic liaison unit of the Ministry of Defense—the report calls for the Internet to be significantly "hardened" from a security perspective, in order to avoid adverse effects for all its users.

There is also a strong warning to governments that in their eagerness to use information technology as a weapon of war against other nations, they should avoid creating malware that will "proliferate" and cause wider harm.

Rising alarm

Transparency is a likely part of any scenario of digitally mediated conflict or competition, the academy says. During the current period of "rising alarm" over possible cyber-warfare, "information transparency is likely to be a persistent reality," it says. "All strategy and policy should be made as if it will become public."

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Facebook has opened its first data center outside the U.S., using 100 percent renewable energy and operating on the edge of the Arctic Circle in Sweden.

Up to now many of Facebook's data centers in the U.S. have been slammed by environmental campaigners for not using renewable energy, but the one in Sweden—located where the River Lule meets the Gulf of Bothnia—may go some way in turning things around.

The data center at Lule is now handling live data traffic from around the world, with all the servers and other equipment powered by locally generated hydro-electric energy.

"Not only is it 100 percent renewable, but the supply is also so reliable that we have been able to reduce the number of backup generators required at the site by more than 70 percent," according to a Facebook statement.

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IBM's Edge event hit Hewlett-Packard in Las Vegas with a one-two punch before the executives at HP Discover even got started.

These were more than the traditional shots pitting IBM solutions against HP products, and HP likely won't know how hard Big Blue hit it until its reps talk to IT folks who attended both events.

EMC and Dell joined IBM in hosting events prior to HP. Each presented a similar story, one driven by marketing, showcasing financial customer benefits and largely playing down products, particularly hardware.

But IBM's timing and approach appeared particularly well-planned, much like a campaigning politician who anticipates a mistake an opponent had repeatedly made. This is pertinent-HP CEO Meg Whitman has a political background-but such skills were not evident in Las Vegas.

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While the curious are looking to get their hands on a pair of Google's Glass, companies also may be looking to weave the computerized eyeglasses into their businesses.

"We see wearables as the logical next step at work," said Kelly Merrell, director of Android development for Mercury Intermedia in Brentwood, Tenn. "It's important for someone working offsite to have information about the location they're going to and to be able to get information about the task they're going to perform."

Merrell talked to Computerworld about Glass and its potential enterprise uses at the Google I/O conference in May, where hundreds of people were trying out the wearable computers for the first time.

Glass is a major project for Google, which has put prototypes of the device in the hands of several thousand developers and early adopters.

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Microsoft will probably price its own 8-inch Surface tablet running Windows RT at $349, just 6 percent higher than Apple's iPad Mini but nowhere near the basement $199 of Android rivals, an analyst said last week.

Sameer Singh, an analyst who covers tablets and smartphones at his Tech-Thoughts website, pegged the price of an expected Windows RT-powered Surface RT "Mini" using a bill of materials (BOM) estimate largely based on industry-wide commodity component costs.

Using the same techniques last year—akin to the "virtual" tear-downs that other research firms have conducted before a rumored product is actually released—Singh accurately predicted the eventual retail prices of Microsoft's Surface RT and Surface Pro tablets.

His sight-unseen BOM for an 8-inch, 16GB Surface RT tablet totaled $203.40, which included a $13 charge for manufacturing.

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Both Facebook and Microsoft said late Friday that they had been given permission from the U.S. government to disclose how many times the two companies had been asked to turn over user information to the Feds as part of a national security order.

However, the data comes with so many caveats that little information can be gleaned from it. For their part, Google and Twitter opted out of similar disclosures, precisely for those reasons.

For the six months ended December 31, 2012, Microsoft received between 6000 and 7000 criminal and national security warrants, subpoenas and orders affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 consumer accounts from U.S. governmental entities, the company said in a blog post. For its part, Facebook said that it had received 9,000 requests of the same nature during the same period.

Both Facebook and Microsoft have been named in reports by the Guardian and The Washington Post alleging that many of the Web's top companies have actively participated in a program, dubbed Prism, that supplied information on Web searches, emails, and other user communications whenever the government requested. AOL, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and the other companies named in the report denied the allegations, with both Facebook and Google doing so vociferously. Edward Snowden, a former employee of the National Security Agency, later outed himself as the source of the information.

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Reader Tammy wrote in with this hassle:

"Whenever I try to print a page from the Internet, the size of the print and the photos is extremely small and difficult to read. I do not have this problem with Word documents."

Tammy says she uses Windows 8, but neglected to specify which browser--so I'm going to assume Internet Explorer.

Let me be the first to note that Internet Explorer can be terrible when it comes to printing. On my Windows 8 system, for example, I went to any number of pages on Microsoft's MSN (the default site for IE), then loaded Print Preview. The result every single time: several pages of little more than links, with none of the actual text of the story I was viewing.

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