Technology

As we race to the close of the companyfourth quarter, it seems pretty clear that Apple has taken some of its repatriated cash assets and done what anybody does when they receive a windfall — the company has gone shopping!

Acquisitions everywhere

In the last few weeks, we&ve seen/learned about:

• The go-ahead for Apple's $400 million purchase ofShazam, which gives Apple access to unrivaled music taste analytics data.
• The $600 millionDialog Semi deal, which gives the company an edge on wireless power.
• AppleSpektral deal — this closed quietly last year. We just learned about it. Why now
• Apple's acquisition ofhot music analytics startupAsaii.
• How Apple CEO Tim Cook recently visited another hugely hot analytics startup, Bytedance.

Thata heap of acquisitions/potential acquisitions spanning music, entertainment, data analytics, power management (and more), and machine imaging.

Don&t know about you, but I&m well beyond fed up with all of the pushed Windows bugs. If you installed your Patch Tuesday patches last week like a good little lemming, Microsoft may have put you in an inescapable loop of blue screens, or turned off your audio.

If either of those plagues hit you, therea complex series of manual steps you can take to work around the problem, combined with two new patches that may help if you can get your PC to boot. Thatassuming you haven&t already bought a new machine, or taken the busted one in for repair.

First, the HP blue screens. I talked about the symptoms on Thursday: After installing the latest Win10 1803 or 1809 cumulative updates, HP machines sprouted WDF_VIOLATION blue screens. If you reboot, the BSOD comes back. Ends up that the BSODs weren&t caused by the cumulative updates — at least not directly — but were, in fact, caused by a bad keyboard driver update that was pushed out the Windows Update chute at the same time as the cumulative updates.

Collaboration tools are everywhere in the business world, but if you and your co-workers use Microsoft Office regularly, you may want to keep your working together close to its applications. The following web apps work on their own in your browser, but they also interoperate with Microsoft Office Online or Office 365 to add collaborative features to your workflow.