Via a Cable & Wireless Communcations (CWC) press release dated May 6 2015 :

Following the completion of the merger of Cable & Wireless Communications (CWC) and Columbus International on 31 March 2015, CWC today announces new corporate and consumer-facing brands for the combined Group, which will be rolled out in the coming months in markets where the necessary regulatory approvals have been obtained.

• CWC will operate under the corporate banner C&W Communications.

• A refreshed Flow will be the unified consumer-facing brand throughout the Caribbean, replacing the former LIME and Flow businesses. (Mas Movil and BTC will be retained as the consumer-facing brands in Panama and The Bahamas, respectively).

• C&W Networks will be the brand representing the wholesale submarine and terrestrial fibre optic cables of C&W Communications, and the former Columbus Networks/JVCO business.

• C&W Business will be the business-facing brand across the whole group, replacing the former CWC Business Solutions, Columbus Business Solutions and Sonitel brands.

  
  

 

Google has updated its satellite imagery of Port of Spain, Trinidad in Google Maps (and Google Earth).  The latest satellite imagery shows new buildings such as:

National Academy For The Performing Arts, Port of Spain:
https://goo.gl/maps/LNQFm

 

International Waterfront Centre:  https://goo.gl/maps/g0oC1

Greyfriars church (what’s left of it): https://goo.gl/maps/2AfYS

One Woodbrook Place: https://goo.gl/maps/eaIW0

 

The Telecommunications Authority of Trinidad and Tobago (TATT) has posted the Draft Telecommunications (Consumer) Quality of Service Regulations for the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago for public comment until May 4 2015.

From the document:

“The Telecommunications (Consumer) (Quality of Service) Regulations seeks to provide the general overarching framework that would safeguard the interests of consumers in the telecommunications and broadcasting sectors and ensure that consumers have a right to the following:

• Access to essential telecommunications and broadcast services;
• Access to the information required to make informed consumption decisions;
• Personal privacy which is respected and protected;
• Minimum standards for consumer-related service quality;
• Protection from unfair and anti-competitive business practices;
• Effective and efficient complaint recognition, handling and resolution;
• Information which creates an awareness of relevant consumer obligations.”

You can View/Download the Draft Telecommunications (Consumer)
(Quality of Service) Regulations, 2015 (PDF ; 739K)

Mirror copy of Draft Telecommunications (Consumer) (Quality of Service) Regulations, 2015

Here’s an event you may be interested in – Microsoft will be hosting a “Transform, Lead, Grow 2015” all day event on Thursday 23 April 2015 at the Yara Auditorium,  Arthur Lok Jack Graduate School of Business. While the event is free, you must register with Microsoft before the event by contacting v-inghan@microsoft.com as there are limited seats available.

The agenda of the event are as follows:

• Registration and Breakfast (7:45 a.m. – 8:30 a.m.)
• Partner Expo (8.30 a.m. -9.00 a.m.)
• Welcome and Introduction – Reimagine Your Business (9:00 a.m. -9:30 a.m.)
• Massive Computing Power at Low Cost: Cloud Security & Privacy
• The Worker of the Future
• Manage Expenditure by Working Smart
• Workforce Unleash.
• Improve Finance Productivity & Turn Profitability with Business Intelligence
• LUNCH (12:15 p.m. -12:50 p.m.)
• Sales & Marketing Productivity & Social Listening
•  Manage Data Centre Costs & Keep Your Projects Alive
• Improve Agility and Reduce Cost
• Wrap-Up (3:05 pm -3:15 p.m.)

 

Screen Savers fans , rejoice!

 “The Screen Savers” was a show about computing and technology that aired on on ZDTV (and later TechTV) from 1998 to 2005. ZDTv and TechTV was shown on local cable as part of the default lineup, so many persons (including many in the Trinidad and Tobago Computer Society) were fans of the 5 days a week, 60 minute live show.

The Screen Savers ended soon after the acquisition of TechTV by G4 in 2005. One of the former hosts of the show was Leo Laporte who founded TWiT.tv Netcast Network in April 2005 which produces many online technology related shows.

On the 10th anniversary of TWIT on April 19 2015, TWIT announced that a weekly show called “The New Screen Savers” will be launched on TWiT on May 2 2015!  The announcement reads:

“We are thrilled to announce that we will launch The New Screen Savers on May 2, 2015. The New Screen Savers will be a weekly, tech-themed variety show that reinvents the format for the modern age. Each hour-long episode will feature help and how-to segments, insight on the latest tech innovations, products, and trends, plus lots of fun surprises.

Every week, Leo Laporte will be joined by an array of TWiT contributors, including original “Screen Saver” Megan Morrone (née Olesky), Mike Elgan, Jason Howell, Father Robert Ballecer, and Bryan Burnett. Some episodes will also feature guest co-hosts from the original show, including Patrick Norton, Kate Botello, Kevin Rose, and more.

The New Screen Savers will record live, every Saturday at 3PM Pacific on live.twit.tv. It will be made available for download and streaming later that evening at twit.tv/tnss.”

TWiT also released a teaser for The New Screen Savers

https://youtu.be/29WWgFLGPhk

 

Every second Tuesday of the month, many software vendors release various security updates and patches for their software. Today is no exception as Microsoft, Adobe and Oracle have all released security updates.

Microsoft Windows and Office

Microsoft released several updates for the Windows operating system and Microsoft Office – many of which are rated important or critical. An excellent breakdown of all of the updates can be found at Ghacks.net

Adobe Flash

According to the Adobe security bulletin dated April 14 2015:

“Adobe has released security updates for Adobe Flash Player for Windows, Macintosh and Linux. These updates address vulnerabilities that could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system”

So update asap! Many conferencing solutions (like Adobe Connect) and Flash games use the Flash plugin.

However, if you only use Adobe Flash for watching YouTube videos, YouTube now defaults to HTML5 instead of Adobe Flash for playing videos in Google Chrome, IE 11, Apple Safari 8 and in beta versions of Firefox. So you can uninstall Adobe Flash if you are using these browsers (and not worry about keeping it up to date)

The latest update bumps the latest version of Flash Player for Windows and Mac OS X to version 17.0.0.169.

To determine what version of the Adobe Flash player you have on your Windows, Macintosh or Linux system,
visit http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/

To download an offline version of Adobe Flash Player for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux without any adware or bundled third party offers, visit
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/distribution3.html .

Opera and Chronium browser users, you’ll have to download the flash player installer from http://www.adobe.com/go/getflash.

Windows users should take note that

• the Flash Player in Microsoft Internet Explorer v9 and earlier versions of Internet Explorer,
• the Flash player in web browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Safari
• the Flash player in web browsers in Chromium and Opera

are separate installs. You should install and update versions of Adobe Flash for all three browser variations if you have all three installed.

For Internet Explorer v10 and Internet Explorer v11 (for users for Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Windows 8), these browsers have Adobe Flash Player built-in and users should update their Internet Explorer browser versions.

Google Chrome browser users has Adobe Flash Player built-in and users should update the Google Chrome browser to the latest version. See https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95414 on how to do so.

Oracle Java

Oracle has also released updates to Java to fix 14 vulnerabilities that are critical and thus, you should update ASAP if you have this plugin installed.

• Java 7 Update 79 can be downloaded from
  
  http://www.java.com/en/download/manual_java7.jsp
• Java 8 Update 45 can be downloaded at
  
  http://www.java.com/en/download/manual.jsp

Also to note, this is the last public update for Java 7 and users are recommended to update to Java 8.

 

The Trinidad and Tobago Computer Society is pleased to announce the release of the TTCS OSSWIN DVD v1.5, a collection of the latest version of Free and Open Source Software for Microsoft Windows (XP/Vista/7/8) and available for download. The collection features a web based interface for browsing programs organised into several categories:  Desktop Applications, Educational, Games, Graphics, Internet, Server, Sound and Video and Utilities.

There were several changes for version 1.5, with 6 new programs added:  Money Manager EX, Graph, Fenix, Audacious, Virtualbox, VeraCrypt and 3 programs removed: Gribsi, Graphcalc, Musikcube and updates for many programs.

See the changelog for more details.

This release also includes several installers created for Neverball, VirtualDub and Audacious to allow for easier installation (and uninstallation) for Windows users.

Visit the TTCS OSSWIN DVD page at http://www.ttcsweb.org/osswin-dvd/ for more details and to download the DVD as an ISO file for burning onto a DVD or extracting to your harddrive or USB storage device.

 

According to VR-Zone, AMD (Advanced Micro Devices ), maker or CPUs (Athlon, Sempron, AMD FX and A series processors) and GPUs (those found in Radeon graphic cards) will be launching new GPUs at Computex in June 2015 named after various Caribbean islands: Trinidad and Tobago, Antigua and Grenada :

The new GPUs expected to be announced by AMD at Computex will be Fiji, Grenada, Antigua, Trinidad, and Tobago. Fiji is expected to be the new flagship GPU, a direct successor to the Hawaii GPU used on the Radeon 290 series cards. Hawaii itself will continue as Grenada, a simple case of rebranding. Similarly, Antigua GPU will simply be rebranded Tonga.

As far as Trinidad and Tobago are concerned, things aren’t quite as clear but it does look like Tobago will be a new GPU while Trinidad will be similar to or simply a rebranded Pitcairn GPU.

WCCFtech also speculates on the GPUs :

We already know about AMD’s Fiji GPU. It is the die that we are sure will be the most interesting of the lineup. If word on the mill is to be believed than the Fiji XT GPU is actually 20% more powerful than the GTX 980 although that would simultaneously make it less powerful than the TITAN-X (caution: educated speculation). The water cooled edition might be worth some surprises though.

Following Fiji, we have Grenada, which is the more efficient revision of Hawaii GPU and will probably feature the supporting lineup to Fiji. However, there is a problem here. There are way too many GPU cores to actually end up in the space from high middle end to high end. Simply put, there are too many cores for all of them to actually make the final lineup. The usual grain of salt with leaks applies but VR Zone is a reliable source and I cannot actually figure out what is going on here.

Lastly we have the Trinidad core, which is probably a rebrand of the Pitcairn core if the last leak was correct, followed by the Antigua Core ( a rebrand of Tonga). The last and slightly more interesting entry is the Tobago core which will probably be featured in the R7 360 GPU.

Read the articles at VR-Zone and WCCFTech

 

 

According to the Adobe Security Bulletin dated March 12 2015:

Adobe has released security updates for Adobe Flash Player for Windows, Macintosh and Linux. These updates address vulnerabilities that could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.

So update asap!

The latest versions bumps the latest version of Flash Player for Windows and Mac OS X to version 17.0.0.134.

Orrr…… if you only use Adobe Flash for watching YouTube videos, YouTube now defaults to HTML5 instead of Adobe Flash for playing videos in Google Chrome, IE 11, Apple Safari 8 and in beta versions of Firefox. So you can uninstall Adobe Flash if you are using these browsers.

But many conferencing solutions (like Adobe Connect) and Flash games require Flash support, so if you fall in the latter camp, update ASAP!

To determine what version of the Adobe Flash player you have on your Windows, Macintosh or Linux system,
visit http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/

To download the latest version of Adobe Flash Player without any adware or bundled third party offers, visit
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/distribution3.html

Windows users should note that the Flash Player in Microsoft Internet Explorer v9 and earlier versions of Internet Explorer and the Flash player in web browsers like Opera, Mozilla Firefox and Safari are separate installs.
You should install and update both versions of Adobe Flash.

For Internet Explorer v10 and Internet Explorer v11 (for users for Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Windows 8), these browsers have Adobe Flash Player built-in and users should update their Internet Explorer browser versions.

Google Chrome browser users has Adobe Flash Player built-in and users should update the Google Chrome browser to the latest version. See https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95414 on how to do so.