Another Windows RT vendor bites the dust...

It’s not just consumers who are avoiding Windows RT these days. In an interview with AllThingsD, Asus chairman Jonney Shih said that his company has no current plans to release any more tablets based on Microsoft’s Windows RT platform because the results from earlier RT tablets have been “not very promising.” While Shih didn’t rule out making a Windows RT device again at some point he said that for now Asus remains solely focused on creating Windows 8 devices that use Intel chips. Asus is just the latest Windows OEM to give Windows RT the cold shoulder as HTC had to cancel plans to release a Windows RT tablet earlier this year and Acer has said that it’s unsure if it will ever release another Windows RT tablet again.

Coming to your Facebook feed....commercials!

It was only a matter of time before Facebook started bringing auto-play ads into users’ news feeds. Unnamed sources tell Bloomberg that Facebook will start letting marketers “buy their way directly” into Facebook users’ feeds “with a 15-second pitch” that will cost them between $1 million to $2.5 million per day to buy. Bloomberg’s sources say that “the commercials will initially be sold on a full-day basis and can only be targeted to users based on age and gender” and that “Facebook members won’t see a spot more than three times in a given day.” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pushed back the timetable for when the new ads will launch because he wants to make sure that they don’t degrade users’ experience on the site, Bloomberg’s sources say.

Free iPads for L.A. Students...

The Los Angeles school board signed an agreement with Apple in June worth $30 million that will see students in the Los Angeles Unified School District receive a free iPad. According to CiteWorld, the program will launch this fall with 31,000 iPads being delivered to the district. By 2014, the program will expand to 640,000 tablets, accounting for all students in the district. The tablets will come preloaded with educational applications and other programs to assist students with their studies. The program hopes to prepare students for the real world by exposing them to new technology that may not be available in their households.

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Should you keep using Windows XP?

Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP on April 8, 2014. That's less than nine months away.

The end of support means the end of updates--even security updates. When an exploit is found after that date, too bad; it will not get patched. Gradually, Windows XP will become less and less secure. And it may not be all that gradual. Malware authors love to use outdated software as a path into your PC--and the more people there are using an outdated program, the more they love it. Besides, an outdated operating system makes a more tempting target than an out-of-date .pdf reader. A year from now, it will be hard to pick a more tempting target than Windows XP.

So, the simple answer is, yes, you can keep using it,....until April 8, 2014.

Google sets Internet record with 25 percent of U.S. traffic

It's no surprise that Google is leaps and bounds ahead of other companies when it comes to search, but Google is even running the game when it comes to Internet traffic.

According to Internet monitoring firm Deepfield, the Web giant has set a new Internet record by running nearly 25 percent of North America's consumer Web traffic through its servers.

"Based on measurements of end device and user audience share, Google is now bigger than Facebook, Netflix and Twitter combined," Deepfield's Craig Labovitz wrote in a blog post. "An amazing 60 percent of all Internet end devices/users exchange traffic with Google servers during the course of an average day. This analysis includes computers and mobile device as well as hundreds of varieties game consoles, home media appliances, and other embedded devices."

Besides Google's search engine and its high-speed Internet infrastructure projects like Google Fiber, the company is also getting huge amounts of traffic through its analytics, hosting, and advertising platforms, according to Labovitz. Another source of traffic for the company are its Google Global Cache servers, which are used by the majority of U.S. Internet providers and also in more than 100 other countries.

Deepfield's last study on Google's Internet traffic was in 2010, which showed that the company was representing just 6 percent of Internet traffic.