Critics argue that web developers are taking advantage of the accessibility of WordPress and inflating their prices, treating it as if they were coding a complex website from the ground up leaving some customers feeling frustrated and perplexed by the high costs associated with a seemingly straightforward task.

“I was shocked when I received a quote from a web developer to design a WordPress website,” said Miss Pace, a small business owner who wanted to revamp her online presence.

“I expected the price to be reasonable since I knew WordPress was user-friendly, but the quote I received was way beyond my budget and in excess of $4,000AUD. It felt like I was being charged for custom coding when all I needed was a basic website.”

Web developers defend their pricing by arguing that WordPress websites require customisation to meet clients’ unique needs, such as designing custom themes, integrating plugins, and optimising for search engines.

They also highlight the importance of expertise and experience in designing websites that are visually appealing, user-friendly, and responsive across different devices.

“Designing a website, regardless of the platform, requires a significant amount of time, effort, and skill,” said Mark Thompson, a web developer with over a decade of experience.

The post Web Developers Under Fire For Charging Exorbitant WordPress Website Design Prices appeared first on Tech Business News.

Java 20 (Oracle JDK 20) delivers thousands of performance, stability, and security improvements, including platform enhancements that will help developers improve productivity and drive innovation

“For more than 25 years, Java has empowered developers to design and build the next generation of robust, scalable, and secure applications,” said Georges Saab, senior vice president of development, Java Platform and chair, OpenJDK Governing Board, Oracle.

“The innovative new enhancements in Java 20 reflect the vision and invaluable efforts the global Java community has contributed throughout Java’s existence,”

“With the support provided by Oracle’s ongoing Java technology leadership and community stewardship, Java has never been more relevant as a contemporary language and platform that helps developers improve productivity.” said Saab

JDK 20 delivers language improvements from OpenJDK project Amber (Record Patterns and Pattern Matching for Switch); enhancements from OpenJDK Project Panama to interconnect Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and native code (Foreign Function & Memory API and Vector API)

Irs’ features are related to Project Loom (Scoped Values, Virtual Threads, and Structured Concurrency), which will dramatically streamline the process of writing, maintaining, and observing high-throughput, concurrent applications.

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In June 2021 Microsoft said it it would cease to support Windows 10 in 2025, a decade after the operating system launched in 2015.

After a drip feed rollout which started in 2021, Microsoft moved into its full scale deployment of Windows 11 to everyone with a compatible computers in May 2022.

Microsoft said Windows 10 users with compatible computers could upgrade to the latest operating system for free. 

Recently, Microsoft updated its Windows 10 product information to indicate that users of the famous operating system will only be able to purchase it up until January 31st, however, it is uncertain how the company will handle downloads and license keys accessible from online stores such as Amazon.

Despite Microsoft’s announcement to suspend Windows 10 sales to customers, it is probable that Windows 10 license keys and computers with the OS preinstalled can still be procured from 3rd party external sources before the software giant totally ceases its support for the operating system.

Amy Bartlow, Windows marketing director,says an update was made to the Windows 10 product page to ensure customers have the latest information on purchasing options for Windows 10,”

The post Microsoft Will Stop Selling Windows 10 Home and Pro Downloads To Customers on January 31, 2023 appeared first on Tech Business News.

Red Hat, has released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1, the latest version of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform.

The recently announced Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.7 was released alongside these minor versions, which add and refine functionality for a wide range of enterprise IT applications, from helping to streamline complicated infrastructure environments to ensuring containerized applications are more secure.

According to Red Hat, its RHEL 9.1 release continues to provide a cost-effective foundation for contemporary applications and environments, as Kubernetes-based application backbones have become the dominant cloud strategy.

The pre-configured operating system images in RHEL 9.1 keep security at the forefront, ensuring that IT teams can use image builder blueprint files to deliver operating system images that meet their organisation-specific system security needs.

From installation, these images can be configured with OpenSCAP security profiles to meet IT security and compliance requirements.

Red Hat’s new offering provides enhanced multi-level security support for agencies or other sensitive operations, allowing classification needs to be better documented and controlled, as well as providing administrators with confidence that operating systems are booting with validated and unchanged components.

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PTG is an operator and investor in real estate software companies, primarily in Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.

The A$0.60 cash per share offer, equating to an implied equity value of approximately A$93.4 million on a fully diluted basis was submitted to the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) by PTG earlier today.

The offer includes MRI acquiring PTG’s well-respected real estate software brands including:

• VaultRE
• VaultEA
• EagleCRM
• Real Estate Investar
• Website Blue
• Designly
• RentFind Inspector 

Many of PTG’s products complement and strengthen the MRI Living™ suite of solutions for residential sales and property management – and add new capabilities in other areas.

David Bowie, Managing Director and Senior Vice President (Asia Pacific) for MRI Software says this acquisition brings immediate value to our real estate agency clients in the region and represents a significant investment in the future of the real estate sector more broadly. 

“In the same way FinTech fuelled growth and efficiencies in banking and finance over the last decade, we believe PropTech will propel the next generation of real estate to ensure its long-term value and contribution to our national economies.” said Bowie

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Millions of people worldwide have Parkinson’s, which is a degenerative brain condition that can be challenging to diagnose as symptoms vary among people. Common symptoms include slow movement, tremor, rigidity and imbalance. Currently, Parkinson’s is diagnosed through an evaluation by a neurologist that can take up to 90 minutes.

Powered by artificial intelligence, the smartphone App records a person’s voice and takes just 10 seconds to reveal whether they may to have Parkinson’s disease and should be referred to a neurologist.

Lead researcher Professor Dinesh Kumar, from RMIT’s School of Engineering, said the easy-to-use screening test made it ideal to use in a national screening program.

He said the team had developed a similar test for people with COVID-19 to reveal whether they need clinical attention, including hospitalisation.

“Early detection, diagnosis and treatment could help manage these illnesses, and so making screening faster and more accessible is critical,” says Kumar

“This research will allow a non-contact, easy-to-use and low-cost test that can be performed routinely anywhere in the world, where the clinicians can monitor their patients remotely.

“It could also promote a community-wide screening program, reaching people who might not otherwise seek treatment until it’s too late.”

The research results are published in the IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine, IEEE Access and Computers in Biology and Medicine.

How the technology behind the voice app works

People with Parkinson’s disease have a voice change as a result of rigidity, tremor, and slowness (known as bradykinesia). Although expert clinicians can identify these symptoms, assessment can be difficult because of the large natural variations in people’s voices.

According to Kumar previous attempts to develop a computerised voice assessment to detect Parkinson’s had been inaccurate due to these significant differences in people’s voices

“We recorded the voices of Parkinson’s patients saying ‘A,’ ‘O,’ and ‘M’ to compare with a control group saying the same sounds, which is similar to the Hindu meditation chant.” says Kumar

Co-researcher Dr Quoc Cuong Ngo, from RMIT’s School of Engineering, said the new technology was faster and better than any similar AI-based approach.

“Our screening test App can measure, with great precision, how the voice of someone with Parkinson’s disease or person at high risk of hospitalisation from COVID-19 is different from healthy people,” says Ngo

The work was carried out in cooperation with the Technical University of Košice in Slovakia, the University of Surabaya in Indonesia, and Rajshahi University of Engineering and Technology in Bangladesh. The research findings were published in several peer-reviewed journals.

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Microsoft Corp. announced Microsoft Viva Sales, a new seller experience application. Viva Sales enriches any CRM system with customer engagement data from Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams, and leverages AI to provide personalised recommendations and insights for sellers to be more connected with their customers. This helps sellers more seamlessly personalise their customer engagements toward faster deal closure.

Employees are demanding more from their employers in today’s hybrid world — from the tools they use, to the hours and locations they work. This is especially true for salespeople. Viva Sales enables sellers to capture insights from across Microsoft 365 and Teams, eliminate manual data entry, and receive AI-driven recommendations and reminders — all the while staying in the flow of work. Viva Sales streamlines the seller experience by surfacing the insights with the right context within tools salespeople already use, saving sellers time and providing the organisation with a more complete view of the customer.

“The future of selling isn’t a new system. It’s bringing the information sellers need at the right time, with the right context, into the tools they know, so their work experience can be streamlined,” said Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer at Microsoft. “Empowering sellers to spend more time with their customers has been our goal — and we’ve done that by reimagining the selling experience with Viva Sales.”

“Sellers rely on digital collaboration and productivity tools to connect with customers and close deals, but a lot of the insights they uncover with these tools don’t make it into the CRM,” said Paul Greenberg, founder and managing principal, The 56 Group. “Microsoft is taking on this challenge by offering a solution that complements the CRM. Viva Sales automates the busy work, captures critical information about the customer and helps sellers get the job done.”

Reimagining the seller experience

Viva Sales builds on Microsoft Viva, which was launched last year. Viva provides an integrated employee experience platform that brings together communications, knowledge, learning, goals and insights to empower every person and team to be their best from anywhere. Viva Sales delivers the first role-based Viva application designed specifically for sellers:

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Cloudian today announced that its HyperStore object storage platform is now integrated and validated to work with Microsoft SQL Server 2022, a relational database management system that supports a wide variety of transaction processing, business intelligence and analytics applications. As a result, Microsoft SQL Server 2022 customers will be able to take advantage of the public cloud-like scalability and flexibility Cloudian brings to users’ own data centres. Cloudian was invited to participate in Microsoft’s Early Adopter Program and after conducting validation testing to ensure seamless integration with SQL Server, the company is part of the newly announced Microsoft SQL Server public preview.

As enterprises increasingly seek to run SQL data analytics applications on-premises to gain greater insights from their local data, they need a modern storage foundation that can support these applications. Featuring fully native S3 compatibility, limitless scalability and industry-leading security – including data immutability for protection against ransomware – Cloudian’s HyperStore solution provides this foundation. It also offers advanced metadata tagging, enabling faster data searches and facilitating artificial intelligence, machine learning and analytics applications. Cloudian delivers all these benefits and more at up to 70 per cent lower TCO, compared to public cloud and traditional storage offerings.

The combination of HyperStore and Microsoft SQL Server enables the creation and deployment of analytical queries for complex applications in cybersecurity, predictive maintenance, risk management and many other areas. It addresses three main use cases:

• Staging files for loading.
• Storing database backups.
• Enabling federated queries using data stored with HyperStore.

In addition, the products support data professionals and their testing of diverse models in parallel on multi-structured data sets, including machine learning.

“Today’s announcement again highlights Cloudian’s leadership in hybrid cloud data management,” said Jon Toor, chief marketing officer, Cloudian. “We were honoured that Microsoft invited us to participate in its Early Adopter Program and now look forward to helping more customers leverage the combined solution to extract greater value and insights from their on-prem data.”

“Our customers have vast data stores on-premises, and they want a storage infrastructure that enables them to run their SQL analytics applications with the same ease and flexibility they would in Microsoft Azure,” said Asad Khan, director product manager, Azure Database Services, Microsoft. “Cloudian’s HyperStore object storage was architected from the start to provide a seamless, cloud-like experience in organisations’ own data centres, providing a robust storage solution for our SQL Server 2022 users.”

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By asking a series of questions, just like in the game of ‘I-Spy’, the new app will help you determine how safe your home is from burglary and what you can do to improve overall security.

This can be done easily and quickly from your living room. Neighborhood Watch CEO Bambi Gordon said a home is burgled every 20 minutes in Victoria, and almost one-third of burglaries are without force and primarily for opportunistic reasons.

“With the support of RACV, our new app will help you assess how safe you are, identify risks and get you thinking about easy things you can do which have a significant impact on how secure you feel,” Ms. Gordon said.

“If you think home security is a boring topic, you are in for a surprise. You can now visit a virtual home to discover ways to secure your property. The app is fun, interactive, and a family-friendly initiative designed to help make your home safer.

“In addition to using the How Safe is My Place app, introducing yourself to neighbors and exchanging contact details, or joining or establishing a Neighborhood Watch group can all make a difference.”

The app was developed after the popularity and success of an online quiz by the same name. Neighborhood Watch used How Safe Is My Place to encourage people to do simple things to secure their home including starting or joining a Neighborhood Watch Group so that they can watch out for each other.

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