Archive for the ‘News’ Category
Thursday, August 7th, 2008 |
Only a month ago Apple released the iPhone 3G, but analysts are already expecting another big announcement from the company next month. Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray, expects Apple to announce redesigns of its iPod line this fall, just as it has for the past three years, as well as changes to the MacBook and MacBook Pro.
But if you’re one of the thousands who are salivating over the imminent release of the MacBook Touch, keep dreaming.
According to Apple watchers this design is too far fetched from what we might actually see from Apple.
Read more: pcworld.com
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Thursday, August 7th, 2008 |
Advertising supported
GOOGLE IS offering a search service for free and legal music downloads in mainland China that are supported by advertising.
Music Onebox, as Google is calling the service, routes punters to Top100.cn, a website that already has licensing agreements with about 100 music labels and allows Chinese wibblers to download or stream tunes free of charge. Internet users outside China are blocked from accessing Top100.cn.
Full story: theinquirer.net
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Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 |
Google has upgraded its Search Appliance for enterprises and government agencies who want a Google-like search for their documents. The new Search Appliance lets employees subscribe to e-mail alerts for topics and documents of interest. Google also offers a spell checker in six languages for Search Appliance.
Google on Wednesday began offering an upgraded version of its Search Appliance. The hardware targets enterprises and government agencies that want a Google-like Web search for office documents.
The upgraded Google Search Appliance searches up to 10 million documents. That’s the same document storage capacity as the previous version that was offered in a five-box rack. A larger, 12-box version can store, manage and search up to 30 million documents.
Full article: newsfactor.com
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Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 |
Big Blue supports Linux based big iron
IBM has launched its first certified open source software package for supercomputers based on Linux.
The new package is designed to ease the burden of deploying supercomputing clusters.
The computing giant unveiled its High Performance Computing (HPC) Open Software Stack at this week’s Linux World/Next Generation DataCentre tradeshow in San Francisco.
Read more: vnunet.com
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Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 |
Steve Jobs has admitted that the MobileMe launch was “not up to Apple’s standards.” That’s in reference to all the problems the service has had since it launched last month.
Jobs admitted as much in an internal e-mail sent to Apple employees, which Ars Technica got a hold of. He said MobileMe shouldn’t have been launched on the same day as iPhone 3G, Firmware 2.0 and the App Store.
Read more: crunchgear.com
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Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 |
Microsoft will be giving companies that sell security software and services to its customers a sneak peek at the technical details of the vulnerabilities in Microsoft software before the company releases its monthly “Patch Tuesday” updates.
The new Microsoft Active Protections Program, set to be announced at the Black Hat security conference on Tuesday, is designed to give software vendors a change to prepare updates to their software before attackers have a chance to reverse engineer Microsoft’s security patch and create an exploit.
“It’s essentially a race between the attackers and the protectors,” said Andrew Cushman, who runs the Microsoft Security Response Center. The program will “give a head start to software providers delivering security features to our mutual customers.”
“It will save (vendors) the work of reverse engineering the patch and identifying where the vulnerability is and what triggers the exploitability,” he said.
Full story: news.cnet.com
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Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 |
We love us some Greasemonkey, the Firefox plug-in that lets users run simple scripts on top of their favorite web pages to add new functionality or remove unwanted distractions. At first blush Greasemonkey might seem more technical than many users feel comfortable with, but running the scripts is really just like adding a plug-in to a plug-in. Give it a try with Gina Trapani’s Better Gmail 2, the top social media scripts we wrote about in May or Hao Chen’s awesome FriendFeed scripts.
But what about the iPhone? Greasemonkey on the iPhone would be the ultimate interface hack for what’s got to be the best interface available today. Enter GreasePocket, an experimental effort to provide just that.
Full story: readwriteweb.com
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Monday, August 4th, 2008 |
HTC still on course to fulfil goals
HTC’s chief financial officer Hui-ming Cheng has stated the company is still on target to release a phone running the new Android UI from Google and others.
The handset, rumoured to be the still unknown HTC Dream, will ship in Q4 this year, which is getting mighty close for a phone that hasn’t been revealed yet.
Read more: techradar.com
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Monday, August 4th, 2008 |
Intel will begin sampling Larrabee in 2008 with products on market in 2009 or 2010
Today there are three main players in the graphics market producing hardware — Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA. As the market stands right now, only AMD and NVIDIA manufacture discrete graphics cards with Intel sticking exclusively to on-board graphics that are common on the vast majority of notebook and desktop computers in the low and mid-range market.
Intel is looking to change that and will be bringing its own discrete products to market at some point. The discrete graphics cards from Intel will use the Larrabee architecture and according to eWeek; discrete graphics cards using the Larrabee architecture won’t be available until 2009 or 2010. EWeek does say that Intel will be sampling Larrabee in 2008.
Full story: dailytech.com
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Monday, August 4th, 2008 |
Chicago (IL) – The Internet rumor mill suggests that Nvidia may be cancelling future developments of new nForce media and communication processors, commonly referred to as chipsets. There is no official confirmation from Nvidia and we don’t expect such a confirmation anytime soon. But the sheer number of reports and quotes from industry sources certainly is reason enough to keep a close eye on Nvidia.
A possible shutdown of its chipset division is the last thing Nvidia wants to talk about these days. The company is gearing for its first big developer event, Nvision 08, which will open its doors in San Jose on August 25. PR and marketing is already in full swing and we just learned that the company is preparing some Guinness World record attempt and convinced astronaut Eileen Collins and actress Tricia Helfer to appear at the show. But the Internet isn’t very interested in the show yet and apparently wants to talk about the future of the company’s chipsets.
Full story: tgdaily.com
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Monday, August 4th, 2008 |
The LiMo Foundation, which advocates the free and open-source Linux operating system for mobile phones, today announced 11 new member companies and 7 new handsets.
Freescale Semiconductor, PacketVideo, Telecom Italia and ZTE are the most noteworthy of the new members. The others are Cellon, Esmertec, , Longcheer Holdings, MIZI Research, Movial Corporation, SK Innoace and VirtualLogix.
In hardware, the new handsets are Motorola’s Motozine ZN5, NEC’s N906i, N906iµ, N906iL and N706i, plus Panasonic Mobile Communications’ FOMA P906i and P706iµ. (FOMA is the name of NTT DoCoMo’s 3G service in Japan.)
Read more: wirelessweek.com
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Friday, August 1st, 2008 |
A few months ago Yahoo offered a limited peek into its BrowserPlus project. At that time, not much was available. Now we are seeing some activity, and even the developer blog at Yahoo started to talk about the project.
Disappointingly, BrowserPlus is still only available for Yahoo properties, but developers can test the API locally. The benefit of this is that when the API is released to the public, your application can take advantage of it immediately. Obviously, this is a competitor to Google Gears, right? Well, the developer blog actually takes a different stance. They are somewhat complimentary because BrowserPlus allows you to download services instead of one monolithic platform. One major benefit of being service based is the ability to update and add new services on the fly. No browser restart or page reload is necessary. Obviously, that is very cool. From the developer perspective, it sounds like you could provide live updates to your services.
Full story: mashable.com
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Friday, August 1st, 2008 |
NewTeeVee writer Janko Roettgers offers his analysis of the FCC decision and concludes that a flurry of lawsuits is going to follow. Read the report.
As expected, the Federal Communications Commission has voted to chastise Comcast for its network management practices, with two commissioners of the five dissenting. Unfortunately, the FCC has decided not to make a formal rule regarding network management practices and has instead decided to adjudicate the issue and move forward with Network Neutrality problems on a case-by-case basis.
Read more: gigaom.com
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Thursday, July 31st, 2008 |
The WSJ is reporting that Google is set to launch a venture fund to give it the option of investing in startups instead of just flat out buying them. The fund will be led by Google’s SVP Corporate Development David Drummond and Bill Maris, a long time business friend of Anne Wojcicki, Sergey Brin’s wife. Maris is a tech entrepreneur with a degree in neuroscience and worked with Wojcicki at a San Francisco-based for-profit company called Catalytic Health.
Read more: techcrunch.com
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Thursday, July 31st, 2008 |
My biggest gripe with the iPhone thus far has been the inability to run apps in the background. It’s something I’ve become accustomed to after having been a loyal Sidekick user and now BlackBerry user. Sure, Apple’s argument against it makes perfect sense, but it’s a necessity for power users like you and me. It was revealed at WWDC that Apple would soon push out a service that allows for applications to run in the background, but in a different manner than what we’re used to with other smart phones.
Read more: crunchgear.com
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Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 |
Several years ago, Dell attempted to break into the Apple-dominated MP3 player market with a line of Creative-designed players marketed under the Dell DJ brand (a lucky Ars editor still owns one, and it continues to work flawlessly in all of its monochrome glory). The company didn’t see the response it wanted and scrapped the program back in 2006, citing competitive market pressure. The market hasn’t changed much, since Apple still mostly owns it, but Dell appears to believe it has something new to offer; it will launch a new series of MP3 players within the coming months.
The company currently sells several MP3 players on its site, including Microsoft’s Zune, but chose not to ally with Microsoft when building its new device. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the news, Dell will offer a tighter, seamless experience between PC, music player, and music store. The player itself will be cheaper than Dell’s previous line of Dell DJ products, will offer WiFi on at least some models, and should come in under the $100 price point.
Full article: arstechnica.com
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Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 |
Amazon.com has launched new online payment options which are clearly stiff competition to the current dominant payment platform on the Web - PayPal. One one hand you see the practical nature of having its own payment system, but on the other there’s a certain amount of reservation about going for a player that does a job as reliably as PayPal does.
Amazon’s Checkout by Amazon and Simple Pay are targeted at small businesses, reported the WSJ. Like PayPal’s one-click system, Checkout allows users to click on a button to pay as well as provides tools to manage other little charges like shipping and sales tax. Simple Pay is the real dealbreaker here - it’s a set of payment-only products that will allow consumers to carry over their wallets to other sites, directly taking on PayPal.
Full article: tech.blorge.com
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Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 |
Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Yahoo will join universities and the National Science Foundation to launch a “global collaboration” into researching and experimenting with cloud computing, the companies announced Tuesday.
The group will build a computing network comprised of six data centers on three continents in order to create a large-scale platform for testing cloud technology, including hardware and software.
Read more: ZDNet.com
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Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 |
Dell has launched its new line of colorful Studio Hybrid desktops, packing a small footprint, high-def video, and price tags starting at $499.
Computer maker Dell has taken the wraps off its new Studio Hybrid line of desktop PCs, and far from being the clunky beige or grey boxes most folks associate with a desktop, the Studio Hybrids are small, colorful, and stylish—plus they pack high-def video capability and a green, power-sipping footprint.
“The design and craftsmanship of the Studio Hybrid alone are enough to cause you to do a double take,” Dell’s VP for global consumer sales and marketing Michael Tatelman, in a statement. “Combine that with the performance of this little beauty and its environmentally smart DNA, and you’ve got something truly unique—something that you can make your own.”
Read more: digitaltrends.com
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