Latest Technology News

On this Earth Day, a number of manufacturers are releasing their "green" product announcements, some believing they're either capitalizing upon, or trying to jump-start, a social trend in smarter engineering. But PC builders and OEMs don't need peace rallies and protest signs to tell them how important it is to make systems and data centers run cooler and with more energy efficiency.

For them, the news from Seagate today about a new class of lower-power Barracuda hard drives that makes an effort to squeeze out a little more performance than low-power drives have before, will make them skip over the whole Earth Day part and go straight to the details. The company's new Barracuda LP series will be unique in that it won't reduce drive rotation as much as other brands and as Seagate's own brands have in the past.

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Sugar Labs, makers of the icon-based GUI for the One Laptop Per Child XO-1 announced today the first beta of Sugar on a Stick, a live version of the operating system that can be booted from a USB stick as small as 1GB in size.

While One Laptop Per Child continues forth despite the crushing blows dealt by the economy, Sugar Labs has found that a Live distro of its linguistically-unencumbered interface will help it grow outside of the confines of the "$100 laptop". Based on Fedora LiveUSB, Sugar on a Stick boots to the Linux distribution, and stores all usage data on the USB device without any alteration to the host system.

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Better late than, um... what took so long, again? Never mind: Microsoft's release this week of a Web interface to its Windows Live Messenger instant-messaging service is good news for users in Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, the UK and the US. (The rest of you are going to have to wait.)

The interface can be reached from one's Windows Live Hotmail or People pages -- in other words, from any computer that can get online. (It worked fine from my Mac and Linux boxes, and from within Firefox.) Sign in as usual and there's a Messenger option in the upper-right corner; you can sign in or, if you need your privacy at the moment, you can ignore it.

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No surprises in the Yahoo earnings call on Tuesday, but not much joy either: EPS for the search giant for Q1 weighed in at a feather-light 8 cents, down 29 cents (or 78%, if you prefer) year-over-year. Net income was $118 million on revenue of $1.58 billion.

Also: CEO Carol Bartz dropped the f-bomb near the end of the call. It may not be the most upbeat hour of the earnings-report season these days, but under Bartz's charge Yahoo's calls are, heaven knows, never dull.

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At a large-scale rollout today, VMware and blue-chip partners filled in the details on a cloud-oriented "virtualization operating system" that's been hinted more and more about since its initial preview at an EMC customer conference last fall.

Essentially, vSphere 4 "slides in a new layer of software" for bringing together "islands" of server software running in different operating environments, said VMWare CEO Paul Maritz, speaking at an event that also featured live appearances by top brass from allies Intel, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell.

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During the early part of this afternoon's conference call with analysts this afternoon, AMD CEO Dirk Meyer told analysts -- one day ahead of a momentous product call scheduled for tomorrow afternoon -- that strong reception and testing for its Istanbul-architecture server CPUs will enable the company to start orders for its first six-core products next month. This will enable shipments of six-core systems from suppliers as soon as June, said Meyer.

This despite a continuing, if somewhat diminished, loss for the first quarter of the year of $416 million, on revenue that was 21% lower annually. The server side of the business, Meyer admitted twice, was something of a downer for the quarter, while sales of CPUs and graphics chips in the desktop and mobile segments rose to compensate. The company continues to be cautious about its outlook, and disputes Intel's claim earlier in the week that the fallout in the technology industry had hit bottom.

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TiVo was definitely an early adopter with Amazon's movie download service, equipping its Series2 and Series3 set-top boxes with Amazon Unbox more than two years ago. As streaming video-on-demand has gained popularity, TiVo's roster of services has grown substantially.

Today, TiVo's version of the Amazon Video on Demand service gains more than 500 high-definition titles from major studios, including new-release films "Frost/Nixon," and "Twilight," and popular TV shows like "Gossip Girl," and "Californication."

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When Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced his acquisition of Sun Microsystems yesterday morning, he didn't mention MySQL at all -- his company's principal competitor in the small systems database space. Maybe that was just for spite: It's no secret that Ellison wanted MySQL; he said so explicitly three years ago. It was one of the key missing elements in the top-to-bottom stack he's been looking for, a way to create a line-up of pre-configured systems with everything customers need right out of the proverbial "box."

But MySQL's place in Ellison's stack doesn't extend to the enterprise, where the Oracle DB still rules -- at least in his mind. Eleven million installed MySQL customers plus a resurgent Microsoft SQL Server aside, Oracle DB is, from Oracle's perspective, an unstoppable juggernaut.

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Today, Taiwan's Tatung University became the first university campus to be covered entirely by Mobile WiMAX (802.16e). The wireless broadband network launched today, and is accessible by more than 4,000 students and professors.

Considering analysts' suggestions that WiMAX is best used for fixed networks, and the opinion of industry leaders that it is not a viable mobile wireless standard, Tatung's experimental network could be the first wise and thoughtful deployment of the misunderstood mobile standard.

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After a weekend of stability testing, version 3.0.9 -- the latest security update to the Firefox 3.0 browser series -- can now be downloaded. As usual, Mozilla isn't making the new version's release public for at least another day, so if you select Check for Updates from the Help menu, you won't see the new version just yet, though you can download it from Fileforum and install it manually without problems.

When the company releases its list of addressed security issues -- perhaps as soon as tomorrow -- expect a larger than normal list. Among the general bugs the organization is addressing is one we've experienced ourselves, especially since many of us use Firefox for communicating with our Betanews CMS: Submitting data content in large forms can sometimes be a real bear, and we've noticed this since version 3.0.7. This issue, among others, has apparently been addressed and fixed.

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German site Netbooknews.de posted a video today displaying a quick demo of the I-Buddie ultra-portable running Android. Though a number of manufacturers have openly discussed the idea of an Android netbook, and testers proved it could be loaded onto a standard Eee PC, none have yet displayed even a working prototype of a purpose-built Android netbook, until now.

There has been a recent spate of rumors about Android netbooks, speculating on a product from anyone from Acer to Nokia, but again, no commitments. The video from Netbooknews.de may show why.

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The District Court of Stockholm's judgment against the Pirate Bay has been appealed, say reports. The keepers of the Pirate Bay BitTorrent tracking site were each sentenced to a year in prison and a combined 30 million kronor for violating copyright law and enabling others to do the same.

Legal representatives for the Pirate Bay's Carl Lundström are contesting the validity of the District Court's ruling. Their argument is based upon the notion that Lundström was charged as an accessory to copyright infringement without proof that he was aware of crimes being committed.

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For newspapers that have seen their advertising revenue -- especially in classifieds -- cut in half or worse by the rapid acceleration of Internet news as an alternative, publishers are faced with a situation where they must transform themselves in order to survive. Just over the last few days, we've learned that Gannett, publisher of USA Today and The New York Times Co. are posting losses for the last quarter at an annual rate of as much as one-fifth, on account of declining ad revenue. Some may not be able to sustain similar losses through the rest of the year, and the Times Co. is threatening the shutdown of the Boston Globe.

Maybe newspaper publishers can save some form of their print media products, and maybe they can't; but in any event, they will need to find some way to make their online operations workable, because print alone will no longer sustain the newspaper business.

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Here's something unusual: A company that actually wants to talk turkey about its financial outlook for the next year or so. That would be IBM, which brought forth on Monday a slightly softer than expected revenue report for Q1, but which is confident of returns of "at least $9.20" for the 2009 fiscal year and between $10 and $11 EPS -- at least -- for 2010.

Earnings per share for Q1 2009 work out to $1.70.

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Google Labs today officially announced the "Similar Images" and "Google News Timeline" tools, which have been deepening the well of useful search apps from the number one search provider since late last week.

Similar Images does exactly as its name suggests. When in Google Image search, queries for common or ambiguous terms frequently yield a lot of undesired results. A search for "colt," for example, could return images of a gun, a horse, a car, or an American football player: quite disparate results. By clicking the "Similar Images" tag under an appropriate picture, the search is narrowed to only the pictures that look similar to the chosen result.

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