Microsoft has applied for a patent on metered, pay-as-you-go computing.
US patent application number 20080319910, published on Christmas Day 2008, details Microsoft's vision of a situation where a "standard model" of PC is given away or heavily subsidized by someone in the supply chain. The end user then pays to use the computer, with charges based on both the length of usage time and the performance levels utilized, along with a "one-time charge".
Yahoo and Intel built their success upon widespread use of personal computers, but the two companies hope products to be shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in January will mark the beginning of their Internet-fueled expansion to the world of TV as well.
The two companies have attracted several significant manufacturing and content allies in the attempt to bring new smarts and interactivity to a part of the electronics world that has remained a more passive part of people's digital lives.
Christmas may be a time of peace on earth but CIOs are unlikely to be so relaxed this festive season, with many saying they'll still be on call over the holidays.
The latest silicon.com CIO Jury found two-thirds of IT bosses confessing they'll be available to work should anything go wrong over the Yuletide holiday.
Some on-call CIOs are required to support their company's operations around the world, which may cover countries that don't celebrate the holiday.
Christmas may be a time of peace on earth but CIOs are unlikely to be so relaxed this festive season, with many saying they'll still be on call over the holidays.
The latest silicon.com CIO Jury found two-thirds of IT bosses confessing they'll be available to work should anything go wrong over the Yuletide holiday.
Some on-call CIOs are required to support their company's operations around the world, which may cover countries that don't celebrate the holiday.
Christmas may be a time of peace on earth but CIOs are unlikely to be so relaxed this festive season, with many saying they'll still be on call over the holidays.
The latest silicon.com CIO Jury found two-thirds of IT bosses confessing they'll be available to work should anything go wrong over the Yuletide holiday.
Some on-call CIOs are required to support their company's operations around the world, which may cover countries that don't celebrate the holiday.
Christmas may be a time of peace on earth but CIOs are unlikely to be so relaxed this festive season, with many saying they'll still be on call over the holidays.
The latest silicon.com CIO Jury found two-thirds of IT bosses confessing they'll be available to work should anything go wrong over the Yuletide holiday.
Some on-call CIOs are required to support their company's operations around the world, which may cover countries that don't celebrate the holiday.
Christmas may be a time of peace on earth but CIOs are unlikely to be so relaxed this festive season, with many saying they'll still be on call over the holidays.
The latest silicon.com CIO Jury found two-thirds of IT bosses confessing they'll be available to work should anything go wrong over the Yuletide holiday.
Some on-call CIOs are required to support their company's operations around the world, which may cover countries that don't celebrate the holiday.
Chinese networking vendor Huawei has slammed as "ludicrous and inaccurate" claims that it had links to the Chinese military and government that could cause security problems for the National Broadband Network.
The Australian newspaper today reported that security agencies would "closely examine" any Huawei involvement in Optus' bid to build the National Broadband Network due to international concerns about the company's links with Chinese authorities.
AMD has announced that XFX, one of Nvidia's top partners across the world, is now an official AMD technology partner.
XFX said that it plans to provide new products based on the Radeon HD 4000 series GPUs beginning in early 2009 – expect to see some early products at CES, I guess.
"In the world of PC gaming, XFX is synonymous with the extreme performance that enthusiasts crave," said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Products Group, AMD. "
In a somewhat bizarre turn of events, Microsoft has released its first application for Apple's iPhone – and it's not available on its own Windows Mobile platform.
CNet spotted the release of Seadragon Mobile by Microsoft's Live Labs on Sunday. Designed as a lightweight, mobile implementation of the Seadragon technology which powers the Photosynth 3D photo gallery system, the free application – available from Apple's App Store – allows images stored on the Internet or on the Photosynth service to be quickly browsed via a 3D accelerated 'deep-zoom' system which allows the viewing of images far larger than the iPhone can handle alone.
Valve has announced that it will be adding two major updates to Steam over the next few days - one for Steam itself, one for Team Fortress 2.
The Steam update is a new opt-in beta client that adds in a new in-game web browser, letting players browse the internet and check out utterly essential sites like bit-tech.net when they get a few minutes of down time - like when you're waiting to respawn, for example.
Comments from a Microsoft employee have revealed that the company may have known that the design of the Xbox 360 would damage game discs from before the console was even launched, but chose to continue with the design anyway.
The comments apparently emerged as part of a class action lawsuit in the US which is focusing on the damage done to Xbox 360 discs by the console drive itself.
The testimony in question comes from Microsoft Program Manager Hiroo Umeno, who says that Microsoft was well aware that game discs could be scratched when the console is repositioned.
Well, that didn't take very long. Sony only released PlayStation Home four or five days ago and the online non-game has already been hacked by users, circumventing some of the advertising systems built into the game.
While we haven't had a chance to confirm the claims of hackers like StreetSkaterFU, video footage on YouTube suggests that the claims may be valid.
PlayStation Home, which was released on December 11th, is an online community provided for free by Sony to all PlayStation 3 users. While not strictly a game, Home does incorporate mini-games, such as bowling and pool. Sony meanwhile litters the online world with adverts and sponsored areas built around certain themes, such as the
The credit crunch is now heavily impacting on game publishers and developers, with French publisher Ubisoft set to lose around EUR 1.5 million due to the collapse of Woolworths and its distribution business EUK, says GI.biz.
Ubisoft's Chief Financial Officer said that payment problems for Woolworths was affecting other partners in other areas of Europe and that Ubisoft was being heavily effected.
"Before the Woolworths incident we had two defaults, one in Germany and one in France, for about EUR 3 million, but since we were covered by about 90 per cent the impact for us should be about EUR 300,000,
This was originally published in CNET News.
Step aside, keyboards, laptops, and 9-to-5 jobs. A survey of more than 1,000 Internet activists, journalists, and technologists released Sunday speculates that by 2012, those quaint relics of 20th century life will fade away.
It's not a formal survey of the sort that, say, political pollsters use. Nor are computer journalists especially known for their prognosticative abilities. Still, the Pew Internet and American Life Project hopes the effort will provide a glimpse of the best current thinking about how online life will evolve in the next decade or so.
Commentary--The current turmoil in the economy and the projected near and medium term downturn have immediate effects on the way we manage enterprise IT. Businesses across the globe are taking action to reduce cost and improve efficiencies. IT is taking a big hit, and the challenge of effectively managing IT with reduced headcount and budgets is growing. Uncertainty is limiting business and IT from knowing they can truly prepare for future demand, the crisis in the capital markets industry is an important example at how the current volatility was very difficult to handle business wise and a formidable challenge for IT.
RadioShack will put an Acer Aspire One 3G Netbook on sale Sunday for $99. But there's a catch. You also have to buy a two-year AT&T DataConnect contract.
The Acer Aspire One grabbed 38.3 percent of Netbook market share in the third quarter, propelling it past industry pioneer Asus and its Eee PC 4G.
Acer's Aspire One normally sells for about $300.
The RadioShack-AT&T offer, as previously reported, is valid through December 20. The 2.44-pound, 9.8-inch by 6.7-inch Netbook includes:
Desperate IT workers who have been laid off will go rogue in 2009, selling corporate data and using crimeware, reports have predicted.
The credit crunch will drive some IT workers to use their skills to steal credit-card data using phishing attacks, and abuse their privileged corporate computer access to sell off valuable financial and intellectual information, forensic experts have warned.
Both PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and security vendor Finjan are forecasting that the recession will fuel a significant rise in insider fraud and cybercrime in 2009.
Top HP software executives said on Tuesday that they believe in the ideas behind cloud computing, but don't like the name of the approach or the "hype" surrounding it.
Talking at the HP Software Universe show and conference in Vienna, Tom Hogan, senior vice president for software at HP, said the company had taken time to weigh up the promise of cloud computing, which provides web-based access to remote enterprise applications and storage.
Commentary--At VMWorld 2007, it felt like the dawn of a new era. Virtualization was taking off and the buzz was incredible. Free from economic crises and bailout drama, companies were playing with this new technology and touting their big implementations of 200 Virtual Machines (VMs) and growing VM infrastructures. Clouds were still fluffy and Hyper-V was coming. At the time, none of us would have guessed where wed be today.
IT spending in the Asia-Pacific region will grow at a slower rate in 2009 than in 2008, but Asian economies will fare better during the current economic crisis than those in the West, according to Springboard Research.
The research company expects growth in IT spending in the Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan) region to be 7.1 percent in 2009, a decrease from 10.2 percent in 2008.
Springboard's Asia-Pacific IT Market Predictions 2009 released Thursday, noted that even though all countries in the region will be affected by the economic crunch, the degree of fallout will vary.
Virtualization promises to usher in a new era of consumer technology in the workplace potentially satisfying the demands of new workers from the Facebook generation who want to use more consumer hardware for work purposes.
Companies are expected to increasingly roll out technology to implement 'sandboxed' virtual machines on staff's personal laptops and mobile devices, allowing workers to choose the hardware they use to do their job, while keeping corporate data safe.
Apple's latest-generation MacBook Pro systems may face the same material defect in their dedicated graphics hardware as encountered by earlier models, according to an investigation by the Inquirer. A dissection of the GeForce 9600M chip shows the part using the same non-eutectic (higher melting point) soldered contact bumps as the GeForce 8600M, suggesting the graphics hardware is prone to the same long-term heat damage risk as the GeForce 8400M and 8600M series chips, producing the blank screens and other video errors that have triggered recalls of previous MacBook Pro revisions as well as wider-still recalls by Dell, HP and others.
TorrentFreak has posted a list (via Kotaku) of the top ten games which were copied and shared over BiTorrent alone this year and if you're one of those piracy-deniers who thinks the number of pirates can't be all that big then the figures below make for some interesting reading.
Interestingly, the number one torrent title of this year is Spore - a game which drew much criticism for having invasive DRM and copy-protection systems.
TorrentFreak has posted a list (via Kotaku) of the top ten games which were copied and shared over BiTorrent alone this year and if you're one of those piracy-deniers who thinks the number of pirates can't be all that big then the figures below make for some interesting reading.
Interestingly, the number one torrent title of this year is Spore - a game which drew much criticism for having invasive DRM and copy-protection systems.
Bluetooth headset maker Jabra on Tuesday announced the launch of a pair of multi-use headsets with the M5390 USB and BT530 USB. Either can pair up with up to eight devices including cell phones and Internet-connected PCs for VoIP or soft-phone use. Additionally, both can pair up to two devices simultaneously, allowing users to answer the device that is ringing. Users can answer either their cellphone or a PC-based VoIP call thanks to the included USB dongle.
Bluetooth headset maker Jabra on Tuesday announced the launch of a pair of multi-use headsets with the M5390 USB and BT530 USB. Either can pair up with up to eight devices including cell phones and Internet-connected PCs for VoIP or soft-phone use. Additionally, both can pair up to two devices simultaneously, allowing users to answer the device that is ringing. Users can answer either their cellphone or a PC-based VoIP call thanks to the included USB dongle.
TorrentFreak has posted a list (via Kotaku) of the top ten games which were copied and shared over BiTorrent alone this year and if you're one of those piracy-deniers who thinks the number of pirates can't be all that big then the figures below make for some interesting reading.
Interestingly, the number one torrent title of this year is Spore - a game which drew much criticism for having invasive DRM and copy-protection systems.
Bluetooth headset maker Jabra on Tuesday announced the launch of a pair of multi-use headsets with the M5390 USB and BT530 USB. Either can pair up with up to eight devices including cell phones and Internet-connected PCs for VoIP or soft-phone use. Additionally, both can pair up to two devices simultaneously, allowing users to answer the device that is ringing. Users can answer either their cellphone or a PC-based VoIP call thanks to the included USB dongle.
Manufacturer:Samsung
UK Price (as reviewed):£73.37 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed):$99.99 (ex. Tax)
As we saw last week in our Solid State Drive group test, there’s still plenty of life in mechanical hard disk drives. While not as fast as the new solid state drives at reading data, they still hold the edge in write performance, cost and capacity and for the majority of systems we’d still recommend a decent large mechanical drive.
Manufacturer:Samsung
UK Price (as reviewed):£73.37 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed):$99.99 (ex. Tax)
As we saw last week in our Solid State Drive group test, there’s still plenty of life in mechanical hard disk drives. While not as fast as the new solid state drives at reading data, they still hold the edge in write performance, cost and capacity and for the majority of systems we’d still recommend a decent large mechanical drive.
Manufacturer:Samsung
UK Price (as reviewed):£73.37 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed):$99.99 (ex. Tax)
As we saw last week in our Solid State Drive group test, there’s still plenty of life in mechanical hard disk drives. While not as fast as the new solid state drives at reading data, they still hold the edge in write performance, cost and capacity and for the majority of systems we’d still recommend a decent large mechanical drive.
Intel has developed silicon-based photoelectric detectors that could cut the cost of fiber-optic communications to a fraction of their current value.
Photodetectors used in a range of applications, such as fiber-optic communications, image sensors, datacenter interconnects and optical drives have been significantly more expensive than a copper-based equivalent.
According to Mario Paniccia, Intel fellow and director of Intel's photonics lab, this is due to the high cost of rare transition metals used in the optical devices.
Commentary--Every business needs electricity to function, but have you ever thought about what it would take to generate it yourself? Youd need engineers, wire, land to build on, permits from the government, and who knows what else to create the right size power plant to suit your needs. Of course in reality, it makes no sense to waste time and millions of dollars to generate our own electricity. It just doesnt make economic sense or add value particularly when theres already electricity available from a common power plant shared by others in your area. Simply put, no one would try to do this on their own.
The Millennium Simulations, an earth modeling venture at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, will allow scientists to model the changes in the world's climate over the last millennium as well as centuries into the future.
By factoring in human influences on carbon, including changes in land use, as well as natural phenomena including volcanic activity, the Millennium Simulations will provide an insight into how the earth's climate will change over the coming decades and centuries.
A UK-led mission to put a satellite in orbit around the Moon which could one day enable lunar colonists to use mobile phones to communicate with each other has inched a step closer to blast off.
The British National Space Centre (BNSC) has announced it will undertake a technical feasibility study of the MoonLITE mission. The study will report with a full mission schedule and costs late next year. Depending on the outcome, the Moon Lightweight Interior and Telecom Experiment mission could launch by around 2014, the BNSC said.
A UK-led mission to put a satellite in orbit around the Moon which could one day enable lunar colonists to use mobile phones to communicate with each other has inched a step closer to blast off.
The British National Space Centre (BNSC) has announced it will undertake a technical feasibility study of the MoonLITE mission. The study will report with a full mission schedule and costs late next year. Depending on the outcome, the Moon Lightweight Interior and Telecom Experiment mission could launch by around 2014, the BNSC said.
A UK-led mission to put a satellite in orbit around the Moon which could one day enable lunar colonists to use mobile phones to communicate with each other has inched a step closer to blast off.
The British National Space Centre (BNSC) has announced it will undertake a technical feasibility study of the MoonLITE mission. The study will report with a full mission schedule and costs late next year. Depending on the outcome, the Moon Lightweight Interior and Telecom Experiment mission could launch by around 2014, the BNSC said.
A UK-led mission to put a satellite in orbit around the Moon which could one day enable lunar colonists to use mobile phones to communicate with each other has inched a step closer to blast off.
The British National Space Centre (BNSC) has announced it will undertake a technical feasibility study of the MoonLITE mission. The study will report with a full mission schedule and costs late next year. Depending on the outcome, the Moon Lightweight Interior and Telecom Experiment mission could launch by around 2014, the BNSC said.
A UK-led mission to put a satellite in orbit around the Moon which could one day enable lunar colonists to use mobile phones to communicate with each other has inched a step closer to blast off.
The British National Space Centre (BNSC) has announced it will undertake a technical feasibility study of the MoonLITE mission. The study will report with a full mission schedule and costs late next year. Depending on the outcome, the Moon Lightweight Interior and Telecom Experiment mission could launch by around 2014, the BNSC said.
Roasted laptops, panthers savaging memory sticks and angry fishermen throwing computers overboard top the list of the year's weirdest computing disasters.
The top 10 data blunders of 2008, compiled by data recovery firm Kroll Ontrack, have seen people across the world falling victim to acts of great stupidity and misfortune.
1. Roasted laptop
A man put his laptop into the kitchen oven before going on holiday to protect it from burglars.
Python developers on Wednesday released the final version of Python 3.0, a major reworking of the programming language that is incompatible with the Python 2 series.
Python is widely used for web applications such as YouTube.
Python 3.0, also called Python 3000 or Py3K, is the first Python release that is intentionally backwards-incompatible, according to project founder Guido van Rossum.
"Nevertheless, after digesting the changes, you'll find that Python really hasn't changed all that much by and large, we're mostly fixing well-known annoyances and warts, and removing a lot of old cruft," van Rossum said in a document outlining the changes.
Oracle has announced that it has contributed data-integrity code to the Linux kernel.
The open-source code, which has been accepted into the Linux 2.6.27 kernel, is designed to reduce data corruption by decreasing the potential for incorrect data to be written to disk, and decreasing application and database errors, Oracle said in a statement on Tuesday. According to the enterprise-software maker, the code helps maintain integrity as data moves from application to database, and from Linux operating system to disk storage.
Within the next 12 years, 40 percent of IT jobs will be related to open source, and open-source-based cloud computing will be solving many problems in the real world, open-source advocates have predicted.
The predictions were made in the 2020 Floss Roadmap, produced for the Open World Forum event in Paris this week.
The authors of the roadmap outlined seven areas of change for 2020:
Floss (free/libre/open-source software) will become mainstream. It will be the de facto standard for areas such as development tools, infrastructure and scientific computing, as well as being widespread in other sectors
Microsoft on Wednesday announced several incremental enhancements to the compatibility of its Office Open XML document format.
The enhancements came out of the Document Interoperability Initiative (DII), a working group set up in March between Microsoft and companies such as Novell, QuickOffice and Dataviz. The object of the DII was to boost the interoperability between Office Open XML (OOXML) and rival XML-based document formats such as the open-source OpenDocument Format (ODF), which was already a ratified ISO standard.
Commentary--Microsoft is to replace its paid-for antivirus product with a free one, citing an altruistic desire to spread protection around the world. But many are less convinced about the company's true motives, says internet-security expert Mary Landesman of ScanSafe.
Microsoft recently announced it was doing away with its subscription-based consumer security suite, Windows Live OneCare. In its place, Microsoft plans a free, standalone antivirus product, code-named 'Morro', which, the company says, will meet the needs of emerging markets. Countries cited by Microsoft as being in this category include Brazil, China and India.
The latest silicon.com CIO Jury has unanimously voted that they are not ready to invest in Microsoft's latest OS Vista.
When asked if they had any plans to implement Vista, which has been subject to criticism since its launch two years ago, not one of the CIOs who replied responded positively.
The results show CIOs have not warmed to the operating system over the last year. In fact, they may have cooled even further. This time last year, the CIO Jury voted 11 to one against plans to implement Vista in 2008.
The lack of core IT skills is a major impediment to modernizing key IT assets, according to a survey by application-management company Micro Focus.
According to the study, published on Monday, there is a shortage of IT skills across Europe and the US, even though such skills are core assets needed during a recession.
Part of the problem is that businesses are now focusing on newer areas such as Web 2.0, without realizing that the skills to support core infrastructure are lacking, Micro Focus chief executive Stephen Kelly told ZDNet UK. "In this survey, we are not devaluing Web 2.0," he said. "The problem is that newer technologies cannot succeed unless they are supported by the core infrastructure."
Chief information officers are "out of the loop", according to a survey carried out by London-based Deloitte and the Cranfield School of Management.
Despite being in existence for over a decade, the role of CIO is often ill-defined, according to the 40 participants in the survey. Respondents included CIOs, senior managers, analysts, consultants and academics.
"The role of the CIO seems to be a source of divided opinion and considerable confusion," states the
Chief information officers are "out of the loop", according to a survey carried out by London-based Deloitte and the Cranfield School of Management.
Despite being in existence for over a decade, the role of CIO is often ill-defined, according to the 40 participants in the survey. Respondents included CIOs, senior managers, analysts, consultants and academics.
"The role of the CIO seems to be a source of divided opinion and considerable confusion," states the
Sun has released version 5.1 of the open-source MySQL database software, but the software's founder simultaneously warned of a number of bugs present in the new features that are still to be fixed.
Michael 'Monty' Widenius, the founder of MySQL, stated in a blog post on Saturday that most of the issues identified were serious or crashing bugs. Not all problems are related to the new features; there are a number of older, known bugs that are still present in this release.
Nottingham University scientists have scooped a prestigious national award for developing a technique that can test for up to 5,000 different allergens from just one drop of blood.
The new basophil-microarray based allergy assay is the brainchild of researchers at NottinghamUniversity’s schools of pharmacy and biosciences, in collaboration with the Centre for Respiratory Research at NottinghamCityHospital.
Their innovation has won them a Da Vinci award in the Breakthrough Technology category, which comes with a £15,000 prize to use towards furthering their research.
Sony is allegedly looking to achieve a slice of Apple's gaming pie – praise of the iPod touch and iPhone's graphics hardware have come from industry giants John Carmack and Sega – as it has apparently signed a license agreement for the PowerVR SGX chipset. EE Timeswrites that an anonymous deal was signed Monday, with little details readily available, which sources say is to outfit the PSP2 with the SGX55x chipset.
Nottingham University scientists have scooped a prestigious national award for developing a technique that can test for up to 5,000 different allergens from just one drop of blood.
The new basophil-microarray based allergy assay is the brainchild of researchers at NottinghamUniversity’s schools of pharmacy and biosciences, in collaboration with the Centre for Respiratory Research at NottinghamCityHospital.
Their innovation has won them a Da Vinci award in the Breakthrough Technology category, which comes with a £15,000 prize to use towards furthering their research.
AMD's 'Shanghai' processors are the company's first chips to utilize the improved performance and efficiency of 45nm technology. ZDNet Germany tests show that they have made up important ground on Intel Xeon chips.
AMD's 45nm chips have arrived almost exactly one year after the first Intel processors to use the same feature size currently the most advanced process used in mainstream processor production. Codenamed 'Shanghai', the new AMD processors are arriving first in quad-core Opterons for two-, four- and eight-processor server platforms, enabling up to 32 cores per server. Phenom variants for desktops, codenamed Deneb, are due in the first quarter of 2009.
Commentary--Enterprise search is still growing, evolving and improving. Its main purpose continues to be to help users find the answers to business questions hidden in a complex myriad of sources. Questions and queries, such as How did the analysts react to our Q2 earnings results or Tell me about the Blackberry Bold, are the basis to an enterprise search system returning accurate results. However, as search becomes more and more of a commodity, many people are beginning to ask whats next for the enterprise search industry. How can we make it even more compelling and offer a new level of search experience? Search experts have come up with an answer by combining search technologies with the fast-evolving area of text analytics.
For the past few months everyone was hoping the IT industry might be saved the worst of the credit crunch fallout, on the basis that technology is vital to enterprise strategies to increase efficiency, improve services and ultimately benefit the bottom line. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that CIOs, along with businesses in general, are now facing increased pressures to reduce their IT costs.
In addressing cost cuts, however, one of the central issues that need to be considered is the 'balance of value'. That is, it is crucial to resist the often knee-jerk reaction to simply cut IT costs down to the bone. Rather, one needs to look at the cost/productivity equation: how to reduce costs while at the same time increasing operational efficiency and competitive advantage.
For the past few months everyone was hoping the IT industry might be saved the worst of the credit crunch fallout, on the basis that technology is vital to enterprise strategies to increase efficiency, improve services and ultimately benefit the bottom line. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that CIOs, along with businesses in general, are now facing increased pressures to reduce their IT costs.
In addressing cost cuts, however, one of the central issues that need to be considered is the 'balance of value'. That is, it is crucial to resist the often knee-jerk reaction to simply cut IT costs down to the bone. Rather, one needs to look at the cost/productivity equation: how to reduce costs while at the same time increasing operational efficiency and competitive advantage.
For the past few months everyone was hoping the IT industry might be saved the worst of the credit crunch fallout, on the basis that technology is vital to enterprise strategies to increase efficiency, improve services and ultimately benefit the bottom line. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that CIOs, along with businesses in general, are now facing increased pressures to reduce their IT costs.
In addressing cost cuts, however, one of the central issues that need to be considered is the 'balance of value'. That is, it is crucial to resist the often knee-jerk reaction to simply cut IT costs down to the bone. Rather, one needs to look at the cost/productivity equation: how to reduce costs while at the same time increasing operational efficiency and competitive advantage.
Two pieces of malicious software affecting Apple's Mac OS X appeared this week: a Trojan horse with the ability to download and install malicious code of an attacker's choice, and a hacker tool for creating backdoors, according to security vendors.
The Trojan called 'OSX.RSPlug.D' by Intego, the Mac security specialist that discovered the threat is a variant on an older piece of malicious code but with a new installer, Intego said.
Sun Microsystems on Wednesday introduced a version of the open-source NetBeans integrated development environment (IDE), with expanded support for web and Java software development.
The highlights of NetBeans IDE 6.5 are the addition of support for the PHP scripting language and a preview version of support for Python. Sun has been expanding the range of programming languages supported in the NetBeans IDE this year, adding Ruby on Rails in May's release of the NetBeans IDE 6.1.
The GSM Association has called on phone manufacturers to build RFID technology into handsets from mid-2009, in a bid to kick start the mobile-payment industry.
The technology, known as Near Field Communications (NFC), is the same kind of contactless payment connectivity that is built into London's Oyster travel card and the latest generation of bank cards. On Tuesday, at the start of the Mobile Asia Congress in Macau, the GSMA said building NFC into phones would "ensure that consumers can reap the benefits of mobile-payment services as soon as possible".
The Mozilla Foundation is planning to end support for the Firefox 2 browser in mid-December, despite the persistence of significant flaws in the most-recent version of the popular browser.
The 'end of life' (EOL) plan for Firefox 2 is part of Mozilla's policy of ending support for previous versions of a product six months after a new version's release. It is designed to allow Mozilla developers to focus their efforts on the current browser version, Firefox 3, released in mid-May.
Cray's XT5 Jaguar supercomputer has narrowly missed displacing IBM's Roadrunner system as the world's fastest supercomputer, according to the results of the bi-annual 'Top500' supercomputing list announced on Friday.
Eighty-five percent of companies are already using open-source software, with most of the remaining 15 percent expecting to do so within the next year, according to analysts at Gartner.
However, only 31 percent of companies surveyed by the analyst house had formal policies for evaluating and procuring open-source software (OSS). Gartner conducted its survey of 274 end-user organizations across the Asia/Pacific, Europe and North American markets in May and June, and announced the results on Monday.
Version 3.0 of the universal serial bus specification has been released.
Unveiled on Monday by the USB Implementers Forum, the USB 3.0 spec can theoretically support data-transfer speeds of up to 4.8Gbps 10 times the speed provided by USB 2.0.
The new standard, also known as SuperSpeed USB, is also expected to be more power-efficient than its predecessor.
"SuperSpeed USB is the next advancement in ubiquitous technology," Jeff Ravencraft, the president of the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), the industry group that promotes USB technology, said in a statement on Monday. "Today's consumers are using rich media and large digital files that need to be easily and quickly transferred from PCs to devices and vice versa. SuperSpeed USB meets the needs of everyone, from the tech-savvy executive to the average home user."
Commentary--Energy efficiency is a significant global issue today, and is expected to be even more important in the future. For the IT industry, concerns about affordable energy are playing out in data centers. Rising costs of energy -- along with limited availability of energy in some areas are forcing the IT industry to take a new approach in designing and managing data centers.
Data centers have doubled their energy use in the past five years, while U.S. commercial electrical costs increased by 10 percent from 2005-2006. With continued projected increases in energy consumption, at some companies, the situation is critical. Gartner research firm estimates that 70 percent of the Global 1,000 -- the worlds largest enterprises -- will need to modernize their data centers within the next five years.
Canonical has announced it will be developing a version of its Ubuntu Linux desktop operating system specifically for ARM's Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 processor architectures.
ARM-based processors have traditionally been used in small devices such as mobile phones, but it emerged in October that ARM's technology would soon be used in netbooks, the new breed of small, low-cost notebook PCs. Thursday's announcement builds on that revelation, as well as on Canonical's announcement in June that it would create netbook-specific distributions of Ubuntu.
Online networks suffered their heaviest brute force attacks to date this year, with more sites than ever coming under sustained assault.
IP networks were bombarded by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks attempts to make networks unreachable by flooding them with traffic as intense as 40Gbps, a survey of 70 IP network operators worldwide has claimed.
The report by Arbor Networks says that the largest sustained attacks in the last two years were 24 Gbps and 17 Gbps, a 67 per cent increase in attack scale over last year.
SAS is unique among tech heavyweights for its private ownership - the business intelligence (BI) company has been run for more than 30 years by its co-founder and majority owner, Jim Goodnight.
silicon.com sat down with SAS's CEO in Las Vegas this week to find out his thoughts on cloud computing, succession planning and the iPhone.
silicon.com: It's been one year since SAS and Teradata announced a strategic partnership. Could there be a merger on the cards?
The technology industry can play a major role in tackling global disease and battling climate change, according to the executive director of Google.org, Larry Brilliant.
Speaking at Salesforce.com's Dreamforce user conference in San Francisco this week, Brilliant said Google's charitable arm, Google.org, has donated around $150m (95m) in grants to charitable organizations since 2004 and allotted around $350m in online advertising space to not-for-profit organizations.
Commentary--Information about location has never been more available or more widely used. Businesses rely on it to plan store and office placement and logistics and to learn about their customers. Consumers use it to get directions and find places to shop.
Sydney, Australia--Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer on Thursday dismissed Google's Android operating system, saying he believed it was financially unsound.
Speaking at Telstra's annual investment day, Ballmer said that Android was Google's first phone operating system and that designing one wasn't easy. "They can hire smart guys, hire a lot of people, blah dee blah dee blah, but you know they start out way behind in a certain sense," he said.
Security expert and BT chief security-technology officer Bruce Schneier has attacked the US-Visit border-biometrics program, saying it has had "zero benefit" in terms of security.
Speaking to ZDNet UK last week, Schneier said that there was little evidence that the US-Visit program, which takes fingerprints and retinal scans from all visitors to the United States, had made any impact on reducing the threat from criminals and terrorists.
Cloud-computing crimeware means networks of zombie machines can be hired to steal online-banking details for as little as $299 (185) per month.
'Fraud as a service' is opening up computer crime to people with no technical expertise, warned Uri Rivner, head of new technology at security company RSA.
Speaking at the RSA Conference Europe 2008 in London, Rivner laid the pricing bare, revealing how fraudsters offer botnet networks as a subscription service, with patching and upgrades thrown in.
The security team behind the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games has revealed how it found the real risks hidden within the millions of alerts received every day.
Faced with 12 million alerts per day, the team at the Games' worldwide IT partner, Atos Origin, used in-house risk-management technology to reduce the alerts to just 90 critical alarms, focusing on the most serious risks.
Honey traps were also used to trap several hackers, using results terminals with security holes to lure criminals into attempting to install applications.
The security team behind the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games has revealed how it found the real risks hidden within the millions of alerts received every day.
Faced with 12 million alerts per day, the team at the Games' worldwide IT partner, Atos Origin, used in-house risk-management technology to reduce the alerts to just 90 critical alarms, focusing on the most serious risks.
Honey traps were also used to trap several hackers, using results terminals with security holes to lure criminals into attempting to install applications.
SAN FRANCISCO/TOKYO--Sony said five PC makers including Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba will recall 100,000 computer battery packs made by the Japanese electronics maker due to a fire hazard.
Commentary--It seems as though there is a watershed event in the search industry every ten years or so. Although Lexis-Nexis first commercialized search in the 1970s, it took a decade of indexing advances such as skip lists and index compression to make indexing practical, and another decade of computing advances to give us billions of searchable documents on the Internet.
Sustained cyber-espionage attacks are being waged on companies that play a key role in the Britain's national infrastructure, a UK cyber-defense chief has warned.
The computer systems of critical businesses in the UK, such as power companies and large financial institutions, are being repeatedly probed to steal information or uncover weaknesses that could take them down.
That was the warning from Mark Oram, head of the threat and information-security knowledge department at the Center for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI), the security service tasked with protecting key government and private organizations in the UK.
LONDON--Internet fraudsters will try to exploit the global financial crisis by sending fraudulent emails purporting to offer cash-strapped consumers new mortgages, loans or money from failed banks, a Microsoft executive said on Wednesday.
Application downtime, whether you're measuring intermittent availability or fully downed systems, is too costly to ignore. The best way to avoid trouble is to view the infrastructure through the eyes of your transactions.
CANBERRA--The Internet is not just changing the way people live but altering the way our brains work with a neuroscientist arguing this is an evolutionary change which will put the tech-savvy at the top of the new social order.
Announced on Sunday, the application allows users of Apple's handset--as well as those of the iPod Touch--to zoom in and out of a virtual globe. Google Earth has been available on the desktop for three years, and has been downloaded more than 400 million times, but the iPhone deployment marks its first mobile version.
Symantec will soon introduce a "reputation-based" software-rating technology that it has claimed can accurately differentiate malicious malware from legitimate programs.
"Reputation-based security is the latest and greatest technology in malware detection," said Basant Rajan, chief technology officer of the IT security vendor's India office.
Essentially, this approach involves looking at where a program can be found across the database of Symantec users, categorizing the reputation of those machines and coming to a judgment on whether the application poses any security risks.
STRASBOURG, France--Airport full-body scanners that show people's private parts are a virtual strip search, European Union lawmakers said Thursday, calling for detailed study of the technology before it is used.
Chipmaker Intel has released an apology for comments made by its executives this week on the inadequacies of the iPhone and the ARM processor driving it.
At the company's developer forum in Taipei, Shane Wall, Intel's vice president of the mobility group and director of strategic planning, platform architecture and software in the ultramobility group, had remarked on the iPhone's performance.
"Any sort of application that requires any horsepower at all and the iPhone struggles," he said.
Wednesday, 22 October 2008
GETTY IMAGES
Murray is the defending champion at the St Petersburg Open
Any speed shortcomings in Apple's iPhone were the fault of its rival chipset manufacturer ARM, a senior Intel executive said in Taiwan Tuesday.
"The shortcomings of the iPhone are not because of Apple," Intel's director of ecosystems for its ultra-mobility group Pankaj Kedia said at the Intel Developer Forum in Taipei, Taiwan. "The shortcomings of the iPhone have come from ARM."
BEIJING--Chinese Internet users have expressed fury at Microsoft's launch of an anti-piracy tool targeting Chinese computer users to ensure they buy genuine software.
NEW YORK--A California train engineer who was sending and receiving text messages was blamed last month for causing one of the worst railroad crashes in U.S. history that killed 25 people.
More annoying than even junk mail is the dreaded Outlook meeting invite. Accept it and condemn yourself to hours locked up in an airless room eating biscuits and drinking too much coffee. Send it and condemn others to the same fate.
The average working person spends eight working weeks per year in meetings, with almost a third of those considered unproductive, according to recent research sponsored by tourism body VisitBritain.
So how can we make the most of that time?
Big software releases like Windows Vista mark the end of "planned software" for the industry, according to Red Hat chief executive Jim Whitehurst.
Speaking at a forum in Singapore on Friday, Whitehurst said the proprietary, "top-down, planned" software-development model, characteristic of closed-source companies, is coming to an end. Such a model is demonstrated by Vista and the number of bugs within it, he said.
Whitehurst claimed that there are "half the number of bugs in Linux per thousand lines" compared to the Microsoft operating system, because of the open-source, collaborative model.
Sony Computer Entertainment Europe has announced that it is recalling the Playstation 3 video game, LittleBigPlanet, from retailers after it learned that the soundtrack featured some Arabic-language lines from the Koran backed with music.
A SCEE representative also confirmed to GameSpot that this recall would be global, and could not confirm when the game would now actually hit shelves with the offending music removed.
Sydney, Australia--The global economic crisis will provide a boost for open-source software, Red Hat chief executive Jim Whitehurst claimed during a visit to Sydney.
Whitehurst, who was in Australia as part of a tour of the Asia-Pacific region, said in an interview with ZDNet.com.au on Wednesday that the crisis would cause companies to consolidate their technology infrastructure and reduce spending.
"So the bad news is when things get tight, people stop investing as much in the future," he said. "I would expect to see a slowdown in spending for new functionality." However, the chief executive said this would cause more companies to consider open-source software as an option.
Few CIOs could claim to have helped recreate the Big Bang at work.
But as head of IT at Cern, Wolfgang von Rueden plays a key role in the nuclear research lab's quest to unravel the nature of the universe by colliding particles at 99 per cent the speed of light.
Von Rueden and his team provide the computing backbone that supports the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator's hunt for the elusive Higgs Boson - dubbed 'the God particle', invisible 'dark' matter and even evidence of extra dimensions.
CHICAGO--Searching the Internet may help middle-aged and older adults keep their memories sharp, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.
Researchers at the University of California Los Angeles studied people doing Web searches while their brain activity was recorded with functional magnetic resonance imaging scans.
Commentary--On every progressive brand managers short list is a sustainability initiative. In just a few short years, the environmental movement has tipped and hit the masses.
LONDON--Doctors baffled by an unexplained rash on people's ears or cheeks should be on alert for a skin allergy caused by too much mobile phone use, the British Association of Dermatologists said on Thursday.
ANAHEIM, California--For many, this morning's keynote address from Blizzard president Mike Morhaime at Blizzcon 2008 was a bit anticlimactic. After revealing Starcraft II, World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, and Diablo III at three consecutive events, Blizzard had nothing new to report on a new game from the company. That changed during the Starcraft II panel, as Blizzard's Rob Pardo revealed that rather than a single real-time strategy game,
The next major release of Opera for the desktop will be 'prettier' than the current version of the browser, claims the company.
Opera, a Norwegian firm, makes browsers for devices ranging from the PC to mobile phones and games consoles. It released an incremental version, 9.6, for the desktop last Wednesday, prompting a million downloads in a day. Version 10 will be more significant, according to the company's web evangelist, Bruce Lawson.
Good news for credit crunch squeezed CIOs: the price of enterprise web 2.0 tools is set to plummet.
According to a new report by Forrester analyst G Oliver Young, the average deal size for web 2.0 tools including blogs, wikis, social networking and enterprise RSS is set to fall over the coming five years, despite an increase in the average number of licenses per business.
The decline in pricing comes on the back of an increasing communization of such software, bundling and subsumption--the inclusion of enterprise 2.0 features into vendors' existing products, negating the need for new standalone offerings.
Good news for credit crunch squeezed CIOs: the price of enterprise web 2.0 tools is set to plummet.
According to a new report by Forrester analyst G Oliver Young, the average deal size for web 2.0 tools including blogs, wikis, social networking and enterprise RSS is set to fall over the coming five years, despite an increase in the average number of licenses per business.
The decline in pricing comes on the back of an increasing communization of such software, bundling and subsumption--the inclusion of enterprise 2.0 features into vendors' existing products, negating the need for new standalone offerings.
Good news for credit crunch squeezed CIOs: the price of enterprise web 2.0 tools is set to plummet.
According to a new report by Forrester analyst G Oliver Young, the average deal size for web 2.0 tools including blogs, wikis, social networking and enterprise RSS is set to fall over the coming five years, despite an increase in the average number of licenses per business.
The decline in pricing comes on the back of an increasing communization of such software, bundling and subsumption--the inclusion of enterprise 2.0 features into vendors' existing products, negating the need for new standalone offerings.
LOD, Israel--Israel has introduced a step-on scanner that spares airline travelers the nuisance of having to remove their shoes so they can be X-rayed for hidden weapons, though the new device cannot yet sniff out explosives.
LOD, Israel--Israel has introduced a step-on scanner that spares airline travelers the nuisance of having to remove their shoes so they can be X-rayed for hidden weapons, though the new device cannot yet sniff out explosives.
Orange has temporarily stopped selling the BlackBerry Bold while it tries to figure out a solution to unspecified 3G-related problems on the handset.
The operator halted sales of the popular handset on Friday. According to a spokesperson, sales will resume when a software fix becomes available, although no date was given.
"Orange UK is committed to providing the BlackBerry Bold to its customers in the UK; however, Orange UK and [BlackBerry manufacturers] Research in Motion (RIM) are currently working on providing a maintenance release of software to address some reported 3G-related concerns," a statement from Orange on Monday read.
Microsoft has a three-pronged strategy to beat VMware in the virtualization market, according to the company's senior director for virtualization product management, Zane Adam.
A key part of that strategy is Hyper-V Server 2008, the hypervisor, which Microsoft made available for download last week. In any virtualization strategy, the hypervisor is the core, and Microsoft sees it as so important that it is giving it away free to attract more customers.
The return rate on Linux-powered netbooks may be higher than that for Windows netbooks, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing for Linux, according to Canonical.
Canonical, which sponsors the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, was responding to figures released last week by MSI, the maker of the Wind netbook.
In an interview with Laptop Magazine, MSI said its studies showed its Suse Linux-based ultraportables were returned at a rate four times higher than Windows-based Wind machines.
Apple made its latest big move into new territories last year with the launch of the now ubiquitous iPhone, expanding beyond the desktop and into the choppy waters of mobile. What ought to be Apple's next leap of faith? Here are a few ideas for where Apple should go next.
Handheld gaming console
Now Apple's an established mobile phone brand, why not go the whole hog by taking the games-and-mobile functionality of the iPhone into the world of gaming proper with a dedicated Apple branded console, la DS Lite or PSP with an N-Gage type device that people might actually buy?
Intel-backed start-up ZPower may be the first to introduce an alternative to the ubiquitous lithium-ion laptop battery, with a silver-zinc technology the company says will make its debut with a large laptop maker in 2009.
The company promises up to 40 percent more run time than current lithium-ion batteries, and says its batteries are 95 percent recyclable.
ZPower made the announcement ahead of the Batteries 2008 conference in Nice, France, which began on Wednesday, and where ZPower's chief executive and president, Dr Ross E Dueber, will be presenting ZPower's take on silver-zinc technology, also known as silver-oxide.
Dell has introduced the Dell PowerVault DL2000, a disk-to-disk system that places backup and recovery alongside the main data storage within one unit, with the aim of speeding up data processes.
By offering both data capabilities in one unit, the system can cut backup times by up to 52 percent and restore times by up to 77 percent compared with tape, Dell said in a statement on Wednesday. The claims are based on information supplied by data-storage specialist CommVault, which provides an integrated software option for the system.
CHICAGO--U.S. researchers have developed ultrathin films that when sandwiched together form a superconductor, an advance that could lead to a new class of fast, power-saving electronics.
The lab cracking data from the Cern Large Hadron Collider experiment needs a new computing hub because its existing one is sucking the power grid dry.
It's a move that's been prompted by the energy demands of the computer center at Cern's servers: the facility can draw a maximum of 2.5 megawatts of energy, yet the task of powering and cooling its massive server racks is already taking it close to that ceiling.
The center's 8,000 servers--which house about 40,000 processor cores--now consume the same amount of power and generate the same amount of heat as about 2,500 hairdressers' shops.
NEW YORK--IAC Corp's Ask.com is overhauling its Web search engine to deliver faster results and improved relevance as it bids to win share from market leader Google.
One of the world's largest computing grids, capable of streaming the equivalent of three million DVDs a year, was officially launched on Friday.
The Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid can draw on the computing power of more than 100,000 processors.
It will allow 7,000 scientists in 33 countries to process the 15 petabytes of data that will be produced each year at the particle accelerator at the Cern laboratories in Geneva, Switzerland.
Two Europeans, one of whom is English, have been indicted by a US federal grand jury in connection with a 2003 distributed denial-of-service attack that is the focus of a major FBI investigation.
The two men, who are not in custody, were indicted as part of the FBI's Operation Cyberslam, initiated in 2003 following a series of crippling distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on a large Los Angeles vendor of digital recorders. The attacks effectively knocked that business offline, along with other private and government bodies, for two weeks, resulting in losses ranging from $200,000 (114,000) to more than $1 million, according to the FBI.
Microsoft will launch an operating system for the 'cloud' in four weeks, chief executive Steve Ballmer told delegates at a Microsoft-sponsored developer conference in London.
Tentatively entitled 'Windows Cloud', although Ballmer suggested it would have a "snazzier name" at launch, the product is designed to make it possible to "just write an application and push it to the cloud", Ballmer said.
'Cloud computing' is a term used to describe a situation where applications are based on web servers and accessed through internet connections, rather than being installed on clients.
Microsoft will launch an operating system for the 'cloud' in four weeks, chief executive Steve Ballmer told delegates at a Microsoft-sponsored developer conference in London.
Tentatively entitled 'Windows Cloud', although Ballmer suggested it would have a "snazzier name" at launch, the product is designed to make it possible to "just write an application and push it to the cloud", Ballmer said.
'Cloud computing' is a term used to describe a situation where applications are based on web servers and accessed through internet connections, rather than being installed on clients.
LISBON--Microsoft launched on Friday a software package for a Portuguese ultra-cheap laptop for school children that the government hopes will boost the country's technological edge in education.
LISBON--Microsoft launched on Friday a software package for a Portuguese ultra-cheap laptop for school children that the government hopes will boost the country's technological edge in education.
LISBON--Microsoft launched on Friday a software package for a Portuguese ultra-cheap laptop for school children that the government hopes will boost the country's technological edge in education.
LISBON--Microsoft launched on Friday a software package for a Portuguese ultra-cheap laptop for school children that the government hopes will boost the country's technological edge in education.
NEW YORK--Is it an iPod? Is it an old-fashioned transistor radio? These are the questions the Slacker portable digital music player will have to answer when it hits U.S. stores this month in time for the lucrative holiday season.
Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system is still playing second fiddle to XP among business users, with more enterprises investigating the unreleased Windows 7 than its predecessor.
More than half (58 percent) of businesses using Microsoft technology are "exploiting" Windows XP, compared to just four percent for Vista, according to research by the Corporate IT Forum (Tif).
Tif also found that 35 percent of organizations described themselves as "not yet interested" in Vista.
Little more than a week after its global launch, Adobe's Creative Suite 4 has shown up on popular BitTorrent tracking sites in large numbers.
The software represents updates to Adobe's flagship Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Acrobat and InDesign products, among others, with the full Master Collection edition, which includes the entire range, selling in the UK for around 1,969 (ex VAT).
However, several casual searches conducted by ZDNet.com.au revealed what appeared to be copies of CS4 and its various included products littered across most of the popular BitTorrent tracking sites--although the files were not downloaded to verify if they were genuine.
Little more than a week after its global launch, Adobe's Creative Suite 4 has shown up on popular BitTorrent tracking sites in large numbers.
The software represents updates to Adobe's flagship Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Acrobat and InDesign products, among others, with the full Master Collection edition, which includes the entire range, selling in the UK for around 1,969 (ex VAT).
However, several casual searches conducted by ZDNet.com.au revealed what appeared to be copies of CS4 and its various included products littered across most of the popular BitTorrent tracking sites--although the files were not downloaded to verify if they were genuine.
Little more than a week after its global launch, Adobe's Creative Suite 4 has shown up on popular BitTorrent tracking sites in large numbers.
The software represents updates to Adobe's flagship Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Acrobat and InDesign products, among others, with the full Master Collection edition, which includes the entire range, selling in the UK for around 1,969 (ex VAT).
However, several casual searches conducted by ZDNet.com.au revealed what appeared to be copies of CS4 and its various included products littered across most of the popular BitTorrent tracking sites--although the files were not downloaded to verify if they were genuine.
LONDON--Microsoft is stepping up efforts to improve online search, where it considerably lags market leader Google, by establishing a three-center research facility in Europe, it said on Thursday.
Bangalore, India--Once a high-flying tech hub, Bangalore is seeing more sober days in the wake of the credit crisis.
It looks like the global economic turmoil and the dramatic Wall Street meltdown is beginning to hit Bangalore.
Until recently, in India's outsourcing hub it used to be one big Googlefest, with all the pampering and cosseting that employees enjoy at the company's Googleplex headquarters in Silicon Valley. I don't know what the latest from Googleplex is. But in Bangalore, it sure looks like the party is slowing down.
Commentary--Was anybody else not surprised by the recent Foote Partners finding that the ongoing demand for workers skilled in SAP technologies grew dramatically stronger in recent months? In an economy governed by the principles of supply and demand, we can expect to see heightened interest and opportunities in what is viewed as more traditional application knowledge such as SAP, Oracle and PowerBuilder along with--dare I predict it--COBOL.
SEATTLE--Amazon.com has fixed a glitch in its video streaming service by adopting Adobe Systems encryption on all television shows and movies found on its site, software maker Adobe said on Monday.
SEATTLE--Amazon.com has fixed a glitch in its video streaming service by adopting Adobe Systems encryption on all television shows and movies found on its site, software maker Adobe said on Monday.
SEATTLE--Amazon.com has fixed a glitch in its video streaming service by adopting Adobe Systems encryption on all television shows and movies found on its site, software maker Adobe said on Monday.
In silicon.com's latest exclusive CIO Jury poll, the respondents revealed they were still steering clear of the application, with 10 out of 12 saying their IT teams are not testing it.
Many in the 'no' camp attributed their lack of Chrome testing to their IT infrastructures being set up to run with Internet Explorer as the default browser.
Nic Evans, European IT director, Key Equipment Finance said: "Too many business applications are only certified for Internet Explorer to consider any alternatives so soon."
OSLO--Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on Tuesday no company was immune to the global financial crisis, which he expects to sap both consumer and business spending.
The economic downturn will see an increase in demand for tech professionals specializing in IT architecture as businesses consolidate their operations.
According to analyst house Forrester, as organizations look at reducing costs through mergers and acquisitions, skills around data, applications and process integration will be increasingly in demand.
Forrester analyst and author of a report looking at IT's hottest roles, Marc Cecere, told silicon.com: "For the economic problems that we're going through right now, there are probably some roles that tend to be helped by this - and those are going to be those around architecture because there's going to be a lot of data integration, application integration, especially process integrations."
The economic downturn will see an increase in demand for tech professionals specializing in IT architecture as businesses consolidate their operations.
According to analyst house Forrester, as organizations look at reducing costs through mergers and acquisitions, skills around data, applications and process integration will be increasingly in demand.
Forrester analyst and author of a report looking at IT's hottest roles, Marc Cecere, told silicon.com: "For the economic problems that we're going through right now, there are probably some roles that tend to be helped by this - and those are going to be those around architecture because there's going to be a lot of data integration, application integration, especially process integrations."
The economic downturn will see an increase in demand for tech professionals specializing in IT architecture as businesses consolidate their operations.
According to analyst house Forrester, as organizations look at reducing costs through mergers and acquisitions, skills around data, applications and process integration will be increasingly in demand.
Forrester analyst and author of a report looking at IT's hottest roles, Marc Cecere, told silicon.com: "For the economic problems that we're going through right now, there are probably some roles that tend to be helped by this - and those are going to be those around architecture because there's going to be a lot of data integration, application integration, especially process integrations."
The economic downturn will see an increase in demand for tech professionals specializing in IT architecture as businesses consolidate their operations.
According to analyst house Forrester, as organizations look at reducing costs through mergers and acquisitions, skills around data, applications and process integration will be increasingly in demand.
Forrester analyst and author of a report looking at IT's hottest roles, Marc Cecere, told silicon.com: "For the economic problems that we're going through right now, there are probably some roles that tend to be helped by this - and those are going to be those around architecture because there's going to be a lot of data integration, application integration, especially process integrations."
The economic downturn will see an increase in demand for tech professionals specializing in IT architecture as businesses consolidate their operations.
According to analyst house Forrester, as organizations look at reducing costs through mergers and acquisitions, skills around data, applications and process integration will be increasingly in demand.
Forrester analyst and author of a report looking at IT's hottest roles, Marc Cecere, told silicon.com: "For the economic problems that we're going through right now, there are probably some roles that tend to be helped by this - and those are going to be those around architecture because there's going to be a lot of data integration, application integration, especially process integrations."
The economic downturn will see an increase in demand for tech professionals specializing in IT architecture as businesses consolidate their operations.
According to analyst house Forrester, as organizations look at reducing costs through mergers and acquisitions, skills around data, applications and process integration will be increasingly in demand.
Forrester analyst and author of a report looking at IT's hottest roles, Marc Cecere, told silicon.com: "For the economic problems that we're going through right now, there are probably some roles that tend to be helped by this - and those are going to be those around architecture because there's going to be a lot of data integration, application integration, especially process integrations."
Earlier this year, Nintendo projected hardware sales of its DS handheld system to total 28 million for the current fiscal year. While that can be considered a massively successful year, it is down slightly from the 30 million portable game players the company sold last year. That anticipated slowdown led one industry analyst to predict a new iteration of the DS hardware is on the way, while another had been expecting such a redesign since last November.
Earlier this year, Nintendo projected hardware sales of its DS handheld system to total 28 million for the current fiscal year. While that can be considered a massively successful year, it is down slightly from the 30 million portable game players the company sold last year. That anticipated slowdown led one industry analyst to predict a new iteration of the DS hardware is on the way, while another had been expecting such a redesign since last November.
Computer maker Asus has announced its Eee PC mini laptop is to get embedded 3G for the first time.
The Eee PC, which launched in 2007 and has spawned numerous, copycat, diminutive laptops, has relied on built in Wi-Fi and the availability of hotspots for connectivity up until now.
Asus said it plans to add HSDPA connectivity to its Eee PC 901 netbook to enable "convenient and high-speed access to the internet anytime, anywhere".
NEW YORK--A security hole in Adobe Systems' software, used to distribute movies and TV shows over the Internet, is giving users free access to record and copy from Amazon.com's video streaming service.
NEW YORK--A security hole in Adobe Systems' software, used to distribute movies and TV shows over the Internet, is giving users free access to record and copy from Amazon.com's video streaming service.
LOS ANGELES--Ford on Wednesday will run an ad featuring a short film that won an online competition, reflecting how companies are seeking to cut costs while boosting their brand awareness.
SANTA CLARA--Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on Thursday he still sees a "certain buoyancy" among technology and telecommunications customers worldwide, despite recent U.S. economic woes.
SANTA CLARA--Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on Thursday he still sees a "certain buoyancy" among technology and telecommunications customers worldwide, despite recent U.S. economic woes.
SANTA CLARA--Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on Thursday he still sees a "certain buoyancy" among technology and telecommunications customers worldwide, despite recent U.S. economic woes.
SUNNYVALE, California--Yahoo is moving ahead on Thursday with a radical redesign of its home page--the most heavily trafficked site on the Web--making changes that give users a personalized view of the wider Web.
