Tim Conneally

Santa Clara County Superior Court on Wednesday ruled that Oracle is contractually obligated to port its software products to HP's servers that utilize the Intel Itanium platform, despite Oracle's move to drop support for the 64-bit server platform in early 2011.

Intel's Itanium first began losing software support in 2009, when Red Hat announced Enterprise Linux 6 would not include the architecture, and then in Spring 2010, Microsoft announced Windows Server 2008 R2 would be the last version of the operating system to support Itanium, which was characterized as the industry's first CISC-based multithreading architecture.

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Microsoft on Wednesday announced the final Windows 8 RTM build has been released to its hardware manufacturing partners, in advance of the developer release on August 15, and ahead of general consumer availability on October 26. The RTM build is the version that OEMs place on machines that ship pre-loaded with Windows.

"While we have reached our RTM milestone, no software project is ever really 'done.' We will continue to monitor and act on your real world experiences with Windows 8—we’ve used the preview process to test out our servicing and we have every intent of doing a great job on this next important phase of the product," Windows President Stephen Sinofsky said on Wednesday. "Hardware partners will continue to provide new devices and improve support for existing devices. PC makers no doubt have quite a bit in store for all of us as they begin to show off PCs specifically designed for Windows 8."

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U.S. Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has made the historic decision to announce his running mate for the 2012 election via a mobile app called "Mitt's VP." The application is available for iOS and Android, and requires users to have a "MyMitt" account on the candidate's personal website.

When Romney's vice president is chosen, users of the app will be pushed a notification "before the press and just about everyone else (except maybe Ann)."

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International IT service management software company LiveTime released Android Service Desk, its first Android-based client in Google Play on Tuesday. The application provides mobile access to LiveTime's SaaS and on-premise enterprise service management, service desk, and helpdesk solutions, including LiveTime Service Manager and Novell Service Desk 7.0 and up. The iOS version of this software was released early in 2011.

The Android client supports all five Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) request types, Request fulfillment, Incident, Problem, Change and Release Management. Each request includes the GPS coordinates of both the customer and the technician, and service requests can launch Google Maps for instant driving directions for the mobile tech. Responses to requests are shown in real time.

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In May, San Francisco startup Leap Motion announced Leap, its pocket-sized 3D sensor designed to bring Kinect-like controls to notebook computers. At the time, the company said there would be "thousands" of free developer kits for interested developers who wanted to participate in the developer program. Today, the company has come forward with some numbers to show how staggeringly high interest is in the little peripheral.

Twenty six thousand (26,000) developers in 143 countries and all 50 U.S. states registered to be in Leap's developer program. A remarkable 15,000 of those requests came in the first week of the program's existence.

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Google on Monday announced it had expanded its almost four-year old Gmail Video Chat service to include Hangouts, the popular new Google+ group video chat service. Beginning today, users will be able to connect to Google+ Hangouts directly from their Gmail interface.

In 2008, Google's Gmail team rolled Google Talk with video chat into Gmail via a relatively small browser plug-in. That plug-in was actually a peer-to-peer client which enabled users to connect to their list of contacts via their respective messaging clients.

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Leading IT systems and technology company Oracle on Monday announced it will be acquiring privately-held company Xsigo Systems. Oracle targeted Xsigo for acquisition because of its network virtualization solutions, a hot zone in IT right now. Just one week ago, VMware announced the billion dollar acquisition of Nicira, a company that specializes in software-defined networking technology similar to Xsigo's.

"The proliferation of virtualized servers in the last few years has made the virtualization of the supporting network connections essential," said John Fowler, Oracle Executive Vice President of Systems in a prepared remark on Monday. "With Xsigo, customers can reduce the complexity and simplify management of their clouds by delivering compute, storage and network resources that can be dynamically reallocated on-demand."

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Even though communication and information technologies have made constant communication
between clients, coworkers, and supervisors even easier, the Bureau of Labor Statistics last month said remote work and telecommuting has actually remained flat since the mid 1990's, and that only around 24 percent of employed Americans said they work from home even just a few hours a week.

The U.S. Department of Education, meanwhile, found comparable statistics for students engaged in distance learning and Web-based education. In 2009, twenty percent of undergrad students took an online or distance learning course of some sort.

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Popular social network Facebook posted its second quarter financial results on Thursday afternoon, revealing a net loss of income for the site at the end of its first quarter as a publicly traded company, but also revealed the huge amount of cash earned from its initial public offering.

Facebook showed a net loss of $157 million, a significant decline against its total income last year, which was $240 million, but this came after a hugely improved revenue flow.

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Users love Netflix, it's something of a cultural phenomenon in America. But slow subscriber growth in the United States, high content acquisition costs, and the high overall cost of rapid global expansion have kept the company from net profitability in the most recent quarters.

Tuesday evening, the company released its second quarter earnings, which triggered a massive 25 percent drop in stock value based upon the appearance that Netflix wasn't performing up to expectations. At the closing bell Wednesday, Netflix stock hovered at $60.28

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As it has been widely reported today, Apple released its latest desktop operating system, OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) to the public. The operating system costs just $20 to download through the Mac app store, and is available to all current Mac users running OS X 10.6 or higher.

But you are a Windows user with no intention of switching over to Mac OS. If you bought a Mac you'd, probably boot Windows on it. You really have no place for Mountain Lion in your heart or mind, so what could anyone possibly say about it that would make you nod your head in agreement that a feature is cool or signifies one trend or another?

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Vizio's Co-Star is one of the first new set top boxes in the second generation of Google TV. It's small, it's powerful, it's the cheapest Google TV yet, and it went up for pre-order today directly from Vizio.

In addition to the Google TV feature package, the Vizio Co-Star includes the OnLive gaming service, making it equal parts connected set-top box, and streaming video game console.

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For just about three years, we've had Microsoft's browser-based suite of free Office tools alongside the desktop Office software. In that time, we've composed and edited loads of Word documents, created Powerpoint presentations, and manipulated Excel spreadsheets. But when these types of Web apps debuted, there were three great islands: the standalone desktop software, the Web-based service, and the mobile application. Each was meant to be used in a different context, and each was equipped with different capabilities to suit those contexts.

For Microsoft in 2010, the PC was still the reigning king, so the Office Web apps were meant to get Office documents off the hard drive and out where they could be easily shared and passed between PCs.

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Earlier this week, consumer electronics superstar Apple announced none of its products would be included in the EPEAT federal registry of green computer products.

Friday, Apple reversed its decision and instead said it would work to meet the soon-to-be-changed IEEE 1680.1 standard that is the basis for EPEAT's ratings.

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With slick marketing, a great sense of humor, and a practical, useful product idea, Texas startup Jumpshot launched its initial public funding round on Kickstarter this week.

The long and short of Jumpshot is that it's a USB stick that removes bloatware, adware, spyware, and malware in a package that toddlers and grannies alike would be able to use. When Jumpshot is cleaning the system in the background, the user can stay connected and browse the Web in a Linux-based sandbox.

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