Latest Technology News

Last September, 2K Games and Gearbox Software announced they would finally be releasing Duke Nukem Forever on Windows, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 after a delay of more than a decade. On Friday, the companies published the title's final release dates: May 3 in North America, and May 6 worldwide.

Even after 2K and Gearbox demonstrated the game's release at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle, there was a considerable amount of doubt and speculation from the public about the game's release. After all, it unofficially holds the title of "most delayed game of all time," with nearly thirteen years between the title's first announcement and its eventual release. Naturally, the sudden news that it would be released should be met with a large amount of skepticism.

A new virus is spreading around Twitter using the Google 'goo.gl' URL shortening service, posing as anti-virus software. Affected users may see tweets with links in their timelines ending with "m28sx.html," says Graham Cruley of security firm Sophos.

Clicking on the link will take the user a page that claims the computer is infected, and attempts to trick him or her into installing the malware-infected software as well as to pay for disinfection. Once downloaded, the virus then posts a tweet under the users account with the link in an attempt to infect his or her followers.

It's one of the most annoying Windows maintenance problems. The more you use your PC, the more your hard drive will become cluttered with all kinds of junk: leftover "temporary" files, various application caches, remnants of supposedly uninstalled programs and a whole lot more.

Of course if you've got hundreds of gigabytes of free space remaining then this may not seem to matter very much. But it will still have an effect. Excessive hard drive clutter can slow down file searches, antivirus scans, defrags, maybe even browsing in Explorer -- so cleaning up your system occasionally is a very good idea.

Sean Clark from mp3Car speaks with Justin from ICS, who has made a demo piece of software to highlight how easy it can be to develop QT apps. These apps are built using QML, which is specifically designed for creating user interfaces.

Some of the really attractive features of this new QML is that it has great animated transitions and state changes built into the language. It can even give you that "flick to scroll -- bounce at the end" feeling.

After being turned away last month in its $6 billion attempted buyout of Groupon, Google is now busy developing an online coupon site of its own, reports indicate. According to Mashable, like competitors Groupon and LivingSocial, users receive e-mail notifications of local deals and have a set time to act.

Activity in the online deals sector has been heating up, with Amazon investing some $175 million into LivingSocial in early December. The fruits of that partnership came to a head this week, when the site offered $20 gift cards at $10. Reports indicate that as many as $1 million in cards were sold in a 24-hour period.

Amazon on Friday announced that its Kindle Digital Text Platform, or DTP, will be renamed Kindle Direct Publishing. All other aspects of the self-publishing platform appear to remain unchanged.

One year ago, Amazon launched Kindle DTP in more than one hundred countries worldwide, pushing Amazon's proprietary Kindle e-book format into the hands of independent publishers and content creators who might otherwise have considered publishing their materials on a more open format, like ePub, which Barnes & Noble's Pubit! self publishing platform uses for creating Nook-compatible e-books.

This week Apple and Google disclosed holiday quarter earnings and made unexpected management changes. The executive shuffles and how they were announced is opportunity to compare and contrast the management styles and corporate cultures of these two hugely successful technology companies.

The basic similarities are interesting: Both companies announced better-than-expected fourth calendar quarter earnings. Both companies made CEO announcements affecting who runs day-to-day operations. Both companies assumed some risk that Wall Street would negatively respond to management changes. But they chose different approaches to announcing these changes.

South Wind Technologies on Thursday released version 2011.1.0 of Earth Alerts, a free windows-based application for tracking the world's natural disasters.

The program can be set up to look for disruptive nature patterns in the areas the user has chosen, these could be earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, tropical cyclones, wildfires, landslides, severe weather, or simply local weather.

Verizon said Thursday that it had filed suit in the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in an effort to challenge the FCC's authority over net neutrality. The FCC voted on December 21 to prohibit ISPs from selectively throttling web traffic on a 3-2 vote.

The court is the same one that struck down an earlier attempt by the communications agency to stop Comcast from throttling BitTorrent traffic. At the time, the three-judge panel said that Congress has never given the FCC the power to regulate an ISP's network management policies.

Google's Chief Executive officer Eric Schmidt will be stepping down from his position on April 4 of this year, and the site's co-founder Larry Page will once again assume the role of CEO.

Thursday afternoon, Schmidt announced that he will be moving to the role of Executive Chairman of Google's board of directors, where he will focus on "wherever [he] can add the greatest value." This might mean making deals, forging partnerships, broadening business relationships, or performing government outreach. Schmidt also says he will act as an advisor to Page and co-founder Sergey Brin.

Berlin-based O&O Software GmbH has released a free defragmentation tool based on its award-winning O&O Defrag Professional software. O&O Defrag Free Edition, which is free for personal use, takes advantage of the same advanced defragmentation technologies found in the latest version (14.1.425) of its commercial sibling to promise improved drive performance for home and non-commercial users.

O&O Defrag Free Edition offers a set-it-and-forget-it solution to the problem of keeping your hard drive defragged: when first installed it gives you the option of scheduling automatic defragmentation either when the computer is idle or on a specified schedule (weekly to monthly). It also allows you to optimize your hard drive immediately by either performing a standard defragmentation or by also consolidating free space.

In a short piece, posted in Harvard Business Review, Google CEO Eric Schmidt lays out three priorities for 2011. I'm not exactly sure when this thing was posted. I saw reference to it today on ReadWriteWeb. Google's three priorities are all about mobile, as they should be.

"First, we must focus on developing the under­lying fast networks (generally called LTE)," Schmidt writes. "Second, we must attend to the development of mobile money," he continues. "Third, we want to increase the availability of inexpensive smartphones in the poorest parts of the world."

T-Mobile currently only has two phones capable of taking advantage of its HSPA+ "4G" network, the myTouch 4G and the G2, but on Thursday the carrier announced the first phone to be able to support the network's theoretical maximum speeds.

Today, as part of the carrier's 4G expansion that is expected to include 25 new consumer devices this year, T-Mobile and Samsung announced Galaxy S 4G, which could be the next 4G smartphone T-Mobile will offer.

Belgium-based commercial open source software vendor OpenERP today announced the availability of OpenERP v6, the latest version of the company's enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite. OpenERP v6 includes updates to almost all of the components in the suite, including its CRM, Purchase Management, Manufacturing, Warehouse Management, Project Management, Accounting, Marketing, Human Resources, and Point of Sale modules.

OpenERP says this version has more than a hundred new features in total, which are the result of thousands of customer and community suggestions and more than a year's worth of development from its community of 800 individual developers.

Faced with an increasingly tough go with its US arm, Deustche Telekom met with investors on Thursday to reaffirm its commitment to the division. According to executives, the German telecommunications giant is considering a sale of some of its non-core assets in order to raise cash.

Deutsche Telekom CEO Rene Olbermann and T-Mobile USA Philipp Humm both were in attendance, reportedly aimed at soothing the concerns surrounding the future of the unit. While an outright sale of the division appears very unlikely, the company appears ready to do what is needed to turn things around.