Japanese technology firm Fujitsu has amazingly managed a profit in the last quarter of 2013 according to its recent fiscal report, helped along by the weaker yen and strong sales in the enterprise sector. The latter point, driven by the company’s decision to increase PC sales primarily to businesses, even saw it defy trends and sell more PCs than ever in a weakening market for traditional computer models.

Company president Masami Yamamoto talked of solid performance in system integration services and in enterprise PCs in their third quarter, as the company claimed a net profit for the three months to December of ¥12bn ($114m), a happy improvement on the previous quarter’s net loss of $786m. Revenue rose 14.5 per cent for the firm to $11.4bn from the same quarter of the previous year.

The Yen becoming weaker against the dollar was not a small factor either. Fujitsu claimed foreign sales earned 25% more revenue for the company this quarter, but if changing foreign exchange rates between currencies were to be ignored, the real rise would have been just 2%.

The firm said it was still hoping to hit its targets this year, when it expects a net income of ¥45bn ($438m) on sales of ¥4.7tn.

“We expect to maintain this momentum for the rest of the fiscal year, and will continue to pursue ongoing structural reforms in the LSI device business and businesses outside Japan, as well as workforce-related measures,” Yamamoto said.

It’s a well-known fact that before Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft’s self-developed browser had quite an established reputation for being both insecure, with many bugs and vulnerabilities; and for being very flippant on HTML standards and breaking websites that, under official HTML guidelines, should work perfectly on all browsers (and usually did, on everything EXCEPT IE). However, since IE8 Microsoft has upped its game; and every Internet Explorer version since has been improving both in terms of standards-compliance and security.

Unfortunately, in the attempt to secure the browser, one of the fixes in recent Windows Internet Explorer versions removed the ability to use ActiveX tools within Internet Explorer. For some businesses, this is unacceptable, because developers in the last decade often developed web-based tools such as account management and business productivity tools that these businesses make strong use of, that took advantage of ActiveX – so these tools not only don’t work in other browsers, but now won’t work with modern IE systems either. With many of these businesses having strong reliance on these tools and unable to replace them with a modern version that doesn’t need the legacy baggage, many businesses are forced to stick with old Internet Explorer versions – and usually, the highest they can go is Internet Explorer 7. This means despite all the recent work by Microsoft to improve Internet Explorer, some businesses are still using a version that’s insecure and doesn’t respect internet standards; and web developers still have to adapt their websites accordingly if they plan to let these businesses see their work.

Many of those web developers state that in some cases, just giving those businesses whole new computers would be cheaper than supporting IE7 – software now five releases out of date. Now one business is putting their money on the table to test the theory. NursingJobs.us has determined it is cheaper to buy each customer using IE7 a brand new computer running a “modern” browser rather than making its slick new site IE7 compatible. The company is a recruitment site for nurses and medical employers, based in Microsoft’s home state of Washington; and following a new website launch, the company has told it users they’ll get a better experience using their new site, which has been revamped for mobile and tablets, on modern computers, devices and browsers.

“Some of our clients are still stuck with IE7 so we decided to make a bold offer, one that initially seemed crazy to us but now makes a lot of sense,” says a blog post the site.

“We are offering to buy a new computer with a modern browser for any of our customers who are stuck with IE7. We determined that it would cost us more to support a browser from 2006 in 2014 and beyond than it would to help our clients upgrade their legacy hardware.”

NursingJobs.us reckons IE7 makes up 1.22 per cent of its traffic.

World of Warcraft is obviously popular, but a new infographic (See Below) reveals that it goes further than that – Azeroth’s population surpasses that of most countries.

Despite its slow decline in active subscribers, World of Warcraft is a pretty darn healthy MMO. Blizzard released an infographic today to celebrate the crossing of a threshold: since its release ten years ago, a whopping 100 million accounts have been created. That includes trial accounts, mind, but there’s no denying it’s an impressive census. In fact, it’s more than twice the entire population of South Korea, as the infographic happily points out.

All in all, Azeroth has a population of about 500 million player characters (an average of five per account, by our math), hailing from 244 countries and territories around the world. 52% of those characters are members of the Alliance, while 47% joined the Horde. Since Pandaren characters start out neutral, there’s also 1% of characters who are still on the fence.

It just goes to show that the glorious Alliance wins because of superior numbers. WOOHOO 😀

World of Warcraft’s economy is still booming as well. Every day sees about 2.8 million trades through the Auction House, which was twice the activity of eBay on Cyber Monday a few years ago. All that trade is handled by just 71 auctioneer NPCs in the game world, who each probably deserve a serious raise.

You can see the full infographic in all its glory over at Battle.net. There’s a lot of big numbers, and they’re well-earned; WoW has been more or less the reigning champion of MMOs for a full decade now. Azeroth still has over 7 million active players as of the last report, and something tells me that its community won’t be leaving it anytime soon.

That is the question Microsoft are now asking all its non-American users, after implementing a new feature that will allow users of Microsoft services who registered as outside the United States to opt to have their data stored only on non-American soil.

Microsoft have become what appears to be the first United States-based company to offer those outside the US the option to store their data off of American soil; and it isn’t too surprising given how vocal they’ve been against lack of user privacy in the United States. They’ve been very unhappy with the revelations given to us thanks to Edward Snowden over the fact that the NSA have been spying on American citizens. They are also unhappy with the fact that their own networks have been used to monitor citizens in countries like Brazil and all over Europe as well. It’s also possible that the move may perhaps have an additional role as a subtle middle-finger to the Syrian Electronic Army, who have repeatedly hacked their American servers in recent months.

So far, Microsoft is the only major company offering explicitly non-US data storage, despite evidence that the NSA has also broken into the private networks of both Google and Yahoo.

While there’s no guarantee the NSA won’t be able to reach servers outside US borders, the move would offer an additional layer of protection, as local law enforcement is likely to respond more aggressively to agents of a foreign country. This of course assumes that Microsoft are serious about their commitment to protect the interests of their customers globally; and not just an act to maintain loyalty with customers outside of the US. There’s also still the unanswered question of what happens when data is transit – data may not be STORED on US servers, but could it still pass through one or more of them when the data is transit – for example, whenever you use a different Microsoft service?

We shall see… soon enough.

Rumours by several sources suggest Apple may currently be working on a whole new set-top box as a successor to current Apple TV boxes, with updated hardware and software to support many more types of content and improve the slickness of the whole experience. But a separate report out today from iLounge says that Apple also plans to cater for the growing number of app developers and iOS users using the boxes as pseudo-game consoles, with plans to introduce native gaming support to the Apple TV, along with direct support for game controllers.

With Apple’s AirPlay technology allowing not just video and music, but also direct streaming of anything that happens on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch onto a TV Screen via an Apple TV box, many users have started taking advantage of the feature to show their small-screen games on TV while they play them on their iDevice. And with Apple allowing iOS app developers to build experiences that employ the Apple TV in specific ways; and iOS games taking advantage of this more and more to provide multi-screen gaming experiences (not unlike the Wii U combining TV and Gamepad), Apple TV is quickly turning into a games console in its own right – but there’s a problem. Streaming games from screen to screen adds a noticeable lag – around a tenth of a second – between the two devices, which for high-action gaming like shooters; or games that require fast reactions like racers, can completely kill the game play. Also, even for games with direct Apple TV support, using controllers other than the iDevice running the game requires those controllers to be paired with the device, not the Apple TV itself, introducing further lag.

Now though, it’s been suggested that Apple are looking into furthering the ability of Apple TV to play games, with sources such as iLounge claiming that planned software updates will introduce the ability to install games directly on the Apple TV box itself, as well as direct support for game controllers. 9to5Mac, who have a high level of accuracy regarding Apple rumours, claim knowledge that Apple may be planning to directly implement the Apple iStore into a future Apple TV refresh, lending some suggestion as to how the former may be achieved – but stop short of suggesting the updates are anything to do with gaming, instead suggesting the new hardware will be a refresh with a focus on improving the speed and user experience.

Apple have declined to comment on any of these rumours.

The current Apple TV last received a significant update in March, 2012, so it’s due for a refresh. Though no date for the supposed new Apple TV has yet been suggested – either by Apple or by rumourmongers – the suggestion from the latter is to expect a launch in Spring or Summer 2014. With Apple generally preferring Autumn for major announcements on the iPhone/iPad side of things these days, that timing would make a lot of sense as a way to keep up interest in Apple throughout the year.