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No matter how good your laptop's battery, it's easy to run out of power by day's end. Here are some ways to keep your system running Whether it happens with that key memo left unfinished, the last scene of a movie unwatched, or an epic gaming battle interrupted, it's likely that at one time or another, you've been left with a dead notebook battery at the worst possible moment. What can you do about it? "Notebooks are not as efficient as they could be," says Robert Meyers, data center product manager for the Energy Star Program at the Environmental Protection Agency, "and they waste a lot of energy." The payoff for being aware of how much power your system uses and how to control it can be huge because every watt saved can run the notebook that much longer. "The natural incentive is that greater efficiency translates directly into longer battery life," Meyer says. In this article, I'll go through 11 ways you can cut down on your l

 Most companies haven't deployed big data projects yet, despite all the hype All the hype around big data last year didn't drive big growth in the worldwide BI (business intelligence) and analytics market, according to research firm Gartner. While the BI and analytics market grew about 8 percent to $14.4 billion in 2013, the uptick could have been even greater, Gartner said. Big data generally refers to mining and analyzing large sets of unstructured information obtained from the social Web, sensors and other sources, versus traditional BI, which runs reports and analyses off structured data stores. "Even though big data hype reached a fever pitch [in 2013], this did little to move the dial for analytics," Gartner analysts Dan Sommer and Bhavish Sood wrote in the report. Only 8 percent of organizations surveyed by Gartner have actually deployed a big data project, with some 57 percent still in the research and planning stages, according to the report. This level

The mobile browsing experience on Windows Phone has steadily improved, taking a big leap forward in Windows Phone 8.1 with its Internet Explorer 11 browser. However, it's still not as good as that of the iPhone. A big part of that isn't because of Internet Explorer—it's because of mobile sites either not recognizing that Internet Explorer on Windows Phone is a mobile browser or using coding that's specific to Mobile Safari. The forthcoming Windows Phone 8.1 Update, as well as adding Cortana support for China and the UK, support for new form factors and accessories, and other minor improvements, aims to make Internet Explorer a much better mobile browser. To do this, the Internet Explorer team has looked at the 500 most popular mobile sites to check their behavior on Windows Phone, and, if they behave poorly, figure out what the problem is. The company says that the work it has done for the Update improves the browser's behavior in more than 40 percent of these site

An Austrian privacy activist has launched a wide-reaching class action suit against Facebook Ireland for breaching European data protection law. Anyone outside of the US and Canada can join activist and law student Max Schrems' suit via the website fbclaim.com, since they will have signed up to Facebook's terms and conditions via the Dublin-based European subsidiary. That amounts to around 82 percent of all Facebook users. After being live for just one hour, the site has collected 100 participants. The suit is seeking damages of €500 ($537) per user, and injunctions to be levied on the company for the following breaches:     Failing to get "effective consent" for using data     Implementing a legally invalid data use policy     Tracking users online outside of Facebook via "Like" buttons     Using big data to monitor users     Failing to make Graph Search opt-in     The unauthorized passing of user data to external apps     Its involvement in NSA's Pris