IBM is working on an open-source project called Jazz to promote programming tools for globally distributed teams.
Set to launch in June at Jazz.net, the project will be based on work from IBM Research and its Rational tools division around geographically distributed collaborative software development.
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On the eve of the Microsoft Vista and Office 2007 launch, Thomas Vinje describes himself as a "native son gone bad."
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Intel continued to reclaim server chip market share from Advanced Micro Devices in the fourth quarter of 2006, but the smaller rival's strength with consumers helped it gain in desktops and notebooks.
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NEW YORK--The actual New York City release of Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system, at midnight on Tuesday, couldn't have been more different from the prelaunch events that filled up many a reporter's business and social calendars on Monday.
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NEW YORK--Now that Steve Ballmer has launched Windows Vista and Office 2007, he has his sights set on getting a key user to upgrade: his wife.
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Sony posted a 15 percent fall in quarterly operating profit on Tuesday after massive losses at its game unit offset robust sales of flat-panel TVs, but it raised its annual outlook closer to market expectations.
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Sony posted a 15 percent fall in quarterly operating profit on Tuesday after massive losses at its game unit offset robust sales of flat-panel TVs, but it raised its annual outlook closer to market expectations.
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WASHINGTON--Google, Yahoo and Microsoft representatives on Tuesday implored the U.S. government to help set ground rules for complying with demands by foreign law enforcement agencies for user records or censorship.
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Apple on Tuesday released the software needed to unlock the fast Wi-Fi chips inside almost every one of its new Macs.
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NEW YORK--It's still a year before Bill Gates shifts from a full-time Microsoft worker to a part-timer. Which is good, because there's plenty he still wants to achieve.
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An effort among Internet activists to halt the extension of copyright protections for orphan works--out-of-print books and media--was dealt a setback last week by a U.S. appeals court decision.
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Sony BMG Music Entertainment announced on Tuesday that it has reached a proposed settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over the controversial embedding of antipiracy software its CDs without users' knowledge.
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NEW YORK--It's not uncommon these days to hear debate about how advertisers and media insiders can successfully get through to the age demographic known as "Generation Y," the "MySpace generation," or the "IM (instant message) generation."
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Sweden plans to be the first country to open an embassy in the popular virtual world Second Life. "It will have answers to questions on all aspects of Sweden," Olle Wastberg, general director of the Swedish Institute, an organization that promotes the country's image abroad, said Tuesday.Read more...
It looks as if plasma is losing ground in the high end of the TV market.
Shipments of plasma panels--sheets of glass placed inside plasma televisions--rose only 3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2006 over the same period the year before and actually declined 4 percent from the third quarter of 2006, according to research firm DisplaySearch.
It was the first quarter that plasma panel shipments grew less than 47 percent on a year-to-year basis and only the second time since the first quarter of 2003 that there has been a sequential decline.
Plasma panel shipments were 15 percent lower than the suppliers' aggregate forecast and 9 percent below DisplaySearch's forecast.
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An alleged marketer of online porn has agreed to pay a $465,000 penalty to settle spam charges, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday.
Under a proposed settlement, TJ Web Productions has also agreed to adhere to federal spam laws, the FTC said in a statement. This means the company has promised to use the phrase "sexually explicit" in message subject lines and ensure that the initially viewable area of the message does not display explicit images.
Additionally, TJ Web Productions has promised that any unsolicited commercial e-mail will include an opportunity for recipients to opt out of receiving future e-mail and provide a postal address, the FTC said. The promises are all required by the FTC's Adult Labeling Rule and the Can-Spam Act.
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The main camera aboard the Hubble Space Telescope has stopped functioning due to a short circuit, NASA announced Monday.
The Advanced Camera for Surveys, installed on the Hubble in March 2002, is considered the Hubble's "workhorse," according to Dave Leckrone, the senior project scientist on the Hubble Space Telescope.
About the size of a public phone booth, the scientific instrument consists of filters and dispersers that can sense wavelengths from ultraviolet to infrared on the light spectrum, and three electronic cameras.
The Hubble will still be able to function, but until a new camera is installed in 2008, the images will not be as far reaching.
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Symantec has launched Enterprise Vault 7.0, which the company says will enable IT managers to prioritize how they store messages.
As well as handling e-mail storage, IT managers can use the product to archive business-critical instant messages, the company said.
"We had a long, hard look at what's happening in the market," said Fredrik Sjostedt, European senior manager for product marketing at Symantec. "E-mail is a mission-critical function, but we needed a wider look to include instant messaging and Microsoft Sharepoint, as people are using the Web as a group interaction tool," he said.
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Flash memory maker SanDisk next week plans to announce a product designed to help businesses manage and control the use of USB drives.
The Milpitas, Calif., company has scheduled the announcement for the RSA Conference in San Francisco, the annual bonanza of security products for businesses. "SanDisk will unveil a comprehensive solution for the enterprise security market, providing protection and control for USB flash drives," the company said in a statement.
USB drives and other gadgets carried around by workers pose a real security risk, security experts have said. Connecting the devices to work PCs could be a vehicle for malicious code to enter a corporate network, or a tool for disgruntled employees to smuggle confidential information out of the office, for example.
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Dr. Eggman writes
"The little used .um internet domain is no more. The domain was used, or rather unused, for US minor outlying islands and the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute had grown tired of maintaining it. This announcement comes as last month ICANN began taking comments on deletion of outdated suffixes. Among the top of the list? .su, the internet domain of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union's .su may prove harder to remove however, as Google still lists 3 million .su sites."
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Verizon Wireless could have been the first wireless carrier to offer the Apple iPhone, but the mobile carrier passed on the opportunity because Apple's financial terms were too steep, Verizon said Monday.
Denny Strigl, president and chief operating officer of Verizon Communications, said the iPhone will help draw attention to the whole mobile-music movement, but he said he was glad Verizon passed on the opportunity. Verizon Wireless is jointly owned by Verizon Communications and the European wireless carrier Vodafone.
"The iPhone product is something we are happy we aren't the first to market with," he said during Verizon Communications' fourth-quarter 2006 earnings call on Monday.
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Nickelodeon on Tuesday plans to launch "Nicktropolis," a virtual world that encourages kids to play games, watch TV and interact with animated characters like SpongeBob.
With Nicktropolis, the children's cable network joins parent unit Viacom's MTV Networks in embracing virtual worlds as a way to showcase television programming and advertisements against a backdrop of 3D graphics, instant chat, games and shopping. MTV operates the virtual world Laguna Beach and owns the wildly popular virtual game NeoPets, among other Net properties.
"The virtual worlds we've been building across our networks give the fans of our brands the high level of interaction they want with one another...with the content itself," MTV Networks CEO Judy McGrath said in a statement.
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MySpace.com will donate a national computer database on U.S. sex offenders to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, the popular social-networking site said Monday.
Sex offender data is collected by individual state authorities. News Corp.'s MySpace and background verification company Sentinel Tech Holdings developed a technology that combines close to 50 U.S. state registries in an aim to help police keep track of an estimated 600,000 convicted sex offenders.
MySpace has increased efforts to block convicted adult sex predators from the site, which is a meeting place for a large population of teens attracted to the service to share photos, blogs, music and videos.
Earlier this month, the families of five girls abducted by adults they met on MySpace sued the company for negligence.
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) said it will use the new database to help law enforcement in investigations. Its local alerts are now incorporated within MySpace.
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U.S. patent examiners are poised to take another look at two controversial patents that critics say may sweep up the dynamic Web page systems commonly used by search features, online merchants and millions of other sites.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced the move last week in letters to the Public Patent Foundation, which last November requested the re-examination. PubPat, as it is known, is a public interest legal group whose directors include free and open-source software advocates.
The patents in question, Nos. 5,894,554 and 6,415,335, cover systems and methods for managing dynamic Web page generation requests--that is, sites that return a customized page based on user input. An enormous number of Web sites use some form of dynamic processing, often through programming languages, such as PHP, that are designed to create Web pages based on database queries.
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More U.S. teachers are using national and international online-news sites in the classroom, leaving behind newspapers that fail to grasp the Internet's importance in trying to reach students, a study found.
Fifty-seven percent of teachers use Internet-based news in the classroom with some frequency, said the study, which was based on a survey of 1,262 teachers in grades 5 through 12 in the fall of 2006 and released on Monday by the Carnegie-Knight Task Force on the Future of Journalism Education.
That compares with 31 percent for national television news and 28 percent for daily papers. Local television news, at 13 percent, was at the bottom of the list, the study found.
"Students do not relate to newspapers at all--any more than they would to vinyl records," one teacher said in the study.
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Priceline.com, Travelocity.com and Cingular Wireless have settled over charges that they used secret adware Internet software programs as marketing tools, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said on Monday.
This is the first time marketers have been held responsible for ads displayed through adware, the software that automatically displays promotional material, Cuomo's office said in a statement.
The settlement calls for Priceline.com, Travelocity and Cingular, the wireless unit of AT&T, to pay New York $35,000, $30,000 and $35,000, respectively, to cover penalties and investigatory costs.
"Advertisers can no longer insulate themselves from liability by turning a blind eye to how their advertisements are delivered, or by placing ads through intermediaries, such as media buyers," the statement said.
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Zink wants to take the printer off your desk and put it in your pocket. The question now is whether you want it there.
The Waltham, Mass.-based start-up has created--with help from Polaroid--a way to print photographs or documents without ink or an ink cartridge. Without an ink cartridge, a printer can be reduced to the size of an iPod or smaller, said CEO Wendy Caswell. The controlling factor when it comes to printer size is whether you want 2 x 3 inch prints or 4 x 6 inch prints. Zink says it has two manufacturing partners lined up, and products based on its technology will come out later this year.
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Photoshop Lightroom, the photo file manager from Adobe Systems, is now available for preorder, the company announced Monday.
Adobe's photo management software, which has been in beta for months for Windows users and since 2005 for Mac OS users, is scheduled to begin shipping in mid-February.
Lightroom is a file management tool intended to complement photo-editing software such as Adobe's Photoshop. It enables photographers to import, minimally edit, manage and output batches of large digital photo files rather than having to deal with each file individually.
It is a direct competitor to Apple's Aperture 1.5 software, which currently sells for $299.
Lightroom will sell at the Adobe store for US$199 in the United States and Canada through April 30, according to Adobe. After that, it will be sold for about $299. The public beta version is set to expire February 28.
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Satellite navigation company TomTom has admitted that it shipped two viruses on a number of its devices.
According to the company, a "small number" of TomTom GO 910 satellite navigation devices were shipped last year with malicious software preinstalled.
"It has come to our attention that a small, isolated number of TomTom GO 910s, produced between September and November 2006, may be infected with a virus. Appropriate actions have been taken to make sure this is prevented from happening again in the future," said TomTom in a statement.
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A couple of people recently have alleged that South Korea is being pushed around by Microsoft. It's not nearly as bad as it sounds.
"This nation is also a unique monoculture where 99.9% of all the computer users are on Microsoft Windows. This nation is a place where Apple Macintosh users cannot bank online, make any purchases online, or interact with any of the nation's e-government sites online," wrote South Korean blogger Gen Kanai. Commentators on technology news site Slashdot have also tsk-tsk-ed the situation.
The pending release of Vista has prompted many to speculate that it could increase security risks.
To some, this looks like the ugly face of monopolism and bad decisions by government leaders and large corporations. But there is actually a much simpler reason why people in South Korea have so much Microsoft software.
They steal it.
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Intel is set to capitalize on a new breakthrough in microchip technology more quickly than its rival Advanced Micro Devices, but analysts say the advantage will only be temporary.
Like two superpowers announcing successful nuclear tests at the same time, last Friday Intel and IBM both said they had solved a vexing electricity leakage problem in microchips.
While hailed as the biggest breakthrough in transistor design in four decades, the advances do not alter the product roadmaps for the two companies, which call for their chips to shrink roughly every two years.
"It sounds more evolutionary to me rather than revolutionary," said Eric Ross, an analyst with ThinkEquity Partners.
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REDMOND, Wash.--Sitting behind a one-way mirror, a white-haired man struggles to access a shared music library within Windows Vista.
"I'm lost," he says. "I'm in trouble here."
On the other side of the glass, several Microsoft executives try to talk him through the experience. Thousands of people have gone through similar tests inside Microsoft's usability lab. But on this day, February 1, 2006, the person inside Building 28 isn't just some random beta tester. It's Windows boss Jim Allchin.
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Borland Software on Monday is expected to release a product meant to further its strategy of selling broad product suites for corporate software development.
Borland Gauntlet is an application that allows software development teams to track and measure the progress of ongoing projects. The release marks the first time Gauntlet is being issued under the Borland name. The company acquired the technology when it bought Gauntlet Systems in May.
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Adobe Systems on Monday is expected to detail plans to submit its Portable Document Format specifications to the International Organization for Standardization, a body of particular importance to governments and large corporations.
Subsets of the PDF format have already been standardized, including one for archiving documents. But Adobe customers, particularly governments, have told Adobe that making PDF an ISO-approved standard would raise their level of confidence that the format would be around in the long term, said Kevin Lynch, Adobe's chief software architect.
"We've already been taking feedback and updating the specification over time. Now we'll be doing it in a more formal way, through a standards body," he said.
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U.S. television networks draw a younger, wealthier and better educated audience when they run their shows over the Internet, according to a study released Wednesday.
The study by Nielsen Analytics and Scarborough Research comes as networks have increasingly made hit TV shows--including ABC's "Grey's Anatomy" and NBC's "Heroes"--available for viewing through computers.
Concerns that allowing consumers to view those popular programs and others over the Internet would cut into the number of people watching them on television are unfounded, the study found.
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SAP failed to give a 2007 outlook for closely watched license sales on Wednesday and said margins would fall as it invests in software for smaller firms, sending its shares down more than 5 percent.
The German software group, which shocked investors by announcing earlier this month that it had missed its 2006 license sales target, said it would no longer forecast license revenues due to changing sales models.
Instead of giving an outlook for software license sales--the money companies pay up front for new software, which hooks them in to maintenance and service contracts--SAP gave a forecast for software and software-related services.
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PALM DESERT, Calif.--Numerous technologies exist to curb energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. The problem is that consumers lack the willpower to embrace them, according to at least one energy expert.
"This country only gets excited about energy when oil prices get high," Dan Arvisu, director of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, said during a presentation at the Clean-Tech Investor Summit taking place here. "We do have a problem with how serious we are about our energy challenges."
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Online DVD rental company Netflix reported lower fourth quarter net income on Wednesday but still beat Wall Street expectations and its shares rose more than 6 percent in after-hours trade.
But the company forecast 2007 revenue below estimates, and one analyst said the company's outlook factors in the impact of stiff competition from rival Blockbuster.
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CNN can promote its advertisement-laced online presence however it likes during broadcasts, but new federal rules mean TV channels like Nickelodeon that cater to children no longer enjoy the same freedom.
The Federal Communications Commission decreed that during shows geared toward children age 12 and under, cable and broadcast operators may not display addresses for Web sites that contain any links to commercial content. The rules took effect on January 2.
Never mind that recent visits to NickJr.com and Noggin.com, online properties of kid networks, turned up more advertisements for Tylenol cold medicine and Nissan minivans than for anything youth-targeted. And some child advocacy groups would argue that many kids' television shows amount to program-length commercials for the toys and edible goodies endorsed by their stars.
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If Jack Thompson, the self-proclaimed crusader against violent games, was looking for a powerful ally, he just found one.
Pope Benedict XVI, current head and spiritual leader of the Catholic Church, voiced his opinion on games Wednesday from the Vatican, saying that violent or sexually explicit games are a "perversion" and "repulsive."
As part of the annual papal message for World Communications Day, the theme of which was "Children and the Media: A Challenge for Education," the pope talked about the media's effect on children, paying particular attention to games and films.
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PARK CITY, Utah--Never before had Sundance Film Festival audience members been part fox, used names like "NeoConD" and "Apparatchik," or had the power to teleport away.
Marking a first for both Sundance and cyberspace, these viewers were avatars watching a feature-length festival film Monday from a screening room in the virtual world of Second Life.
"This is one for the grandkids," said Henrik Bennetsen, who helped with the presentation in Second Life as part of the Stanford Humanities Lab.
The avatars were joined by real-life festivalgoers in a wired theater that allowed for a subsequent forum in which questions were fielded from both worlds.
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Not making enough money off the Google ads on your Web site? No problem. Add pay-per-click job listings.
Job classifieds search engine Simply Hired on Wednesday launched a service dubbed "Job-a-matic," which lets Web site publishers and bloggers add listings for jobs that are related to the content on their site. The site makes money every time someone clicks on a listing, receiving 30 percent of the revenue generated, said Gautam Godhwani, chief executive of Simply Hired.
Simply Hired modeled its pay-per-click system on Google's AdWords search-marketing system, in which advertisers bid on keywords in an auction and agree to pay a certain price each time their ad is clicked on.
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Japan's Toshiba said on Wednesday it will match rival Samsung Electronics' March launch of the industry's first 2GB NAND flash chip by mass-producing a chip with as much storage a month later.
Toshiba, the world's second-largest NAND chip maker after Samsung, is eyeing an expected a surge in demand propelled by Apple's music-playing iPhone, analysts said.
The iPhone--which will come with 4GB or 8GB of NAND--has fueled hope among flash memory makers who have become weary of price falls eating away at profit margins, said Mizuho Investors Securities analyst Yuichi Ishida.
"The iPhone is testament that price falls are giving birth to new applications and new NAND demand," Ishida said.
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The New York City Employees' Retirement System said on Monday it was picked as the lead plaintiff in a shareholder lawsuit against Apple over its stock options practices.
The pension fund will spearhead the lawsuit, which contends Apple violated securities laws through its options awards to top executives, according to the fund's law firm, Grant & Eisenhofer.
The lawsuit seeks class-action status on behalf of other investors in the company.
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Would you like some extra support with that software?
That's what Microsoft is now offering buyers of Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Media Center Edition. The company announced on Wednesday that it is adding five-year customer support for the operating systems, marking the first time that such extended service has been offered with a Microsoft consumer product.
The "extended" support, which kicks in after April 2009, will bring the two products on par with Microsoft's Windows XP Professional for businesses. Microsoft previously reserved its five-year extended support feature to only enterprise-grade products.
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Microsoft will kick off its Windows Vista launch activities with a human billboard in downtown New York.
The Cirque du Soleil-style performance will take place at 9 a.m. Monday at the Terminal Building.
"It's a billboard. It's marketing, except that it's made by people," Mike Sievert, corporate VP for Windows told CNET News.com late Wednesday.
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A former Hewlett-Packard executive accused by the company of stealing trade secrets is now saying that he was instructed by the company's management to spy on rival Dell.
Karl Kamb Jr., previously HP's vice president of business development and strategy, was named as a defendant in a federal lawsuit filed by HP in 2005. It alleges that onetime HP employees illegally started a rival flat-screen TV company while still working at HP and it is claiming up to $100 million in damages.
Kamb, who has denied any wrongdoing, filed a countersuit in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas on Friday, according to legal documents.
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Quarterly net profit at eBay rose 24 percent, aided by strength in its core auction business and by international growth, and the company said 2007 earnings would be at the high end of analysts' forecasts.
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Internet service providers naturally are concerned about circumstances under which they potentially could be held liable for content posted by users. But after a recent decision by a Texas federal judge, ISPs can breathe a collective sigh of relief.
The judge dismissed an ISP as a defendant in the case of Doe v. Bates (PDF), even though the offending conduct at issue was alleged to be in violation of criminal law.
In that case, the plaintiffs alleged that the ISP knowingly hosted illegal child pornography on a particular e-group. An e-group is an Internet-based forum where users can engage in discussions and share files and the like. The e-group at issue was just one of a multitude of e-groups registered with this ISP.
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Apple on Tuesday released a fix for a serious security hole in its QuickTime media player software.
The patch comes 23 days after details of the flaw, along with detailed attack code, were publicly released. The publication kicked off the "Month of the Apple Bugs" project, which has been publishing a new Apple software bug each day in January.
The QuickTime vulnerability relates to how the media player software handles the Real Time Streaming Protocol, or RTSP, according to an Apple alert. An attacker could exploit the flaw and commandeer a vulnerable system by placing a special RTSP string in a QuickTime file and tricking a user into opening that file, Apple said.
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