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.
