Latest Technology News

Nintendo today has provided a solution for the Wii's painfully underdeveloped onboard storage by endowing the console with the ability to boot games directly off of SD cards.

Previously, any downloaded games could only be launched if they were installed on the Wii, but with the System's meager 512 MB flash memory, that only left space for a handful of titles. While this was manageable early on, when all that was available were Virtual Console emulator titles that didn't consume much space, the introduction of WiiWare titles made that small amount of storage seem even smaller.

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It's axiomatic that any site redesign will cause hysterics among some portion of the readership. But Facebook's user complaints over the new look have succeeded to the extent of eliciting a lengthy, slightly abashed, and palpably frustrated blog post from Chris Cox, the company's "director of product," discussing where the site goes from here.

What users apparently will not succeed in doing is in getting Facebook to back down from its new, more Twitter-like mien. The post outlines a variety of adjustments in the works, including live page updating (no more hitting Refresh!), better control over which applications intrude in one's stream, realignment with the new Highlights features to bring it back in line with the old News Feed functionality, and some reorganization of navigation components.

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Sprint announced today that WiMAX will be coming to ten major markets this year: Atlanta, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, Seattle, Portland, Charlotte, and Fort Worth.

Unlike Baltimore, the only city with a complete Sprint WiMAX deployment, these will not fall under the Xohm moniker. Nor will they fall under the spun-off "Clear" brand, even though the deployments are going to be essentially the same.

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Today's big data center announcements from Dell may have been expedited just a tad by Cisco, which stirred up interest last week after having unveiled its very first Unified Computing System. In an environment where other big companies are scaling back, Cisco is building on two fronts, the other one being the acquisition -- also last week -- of pocket camcorder maker Flip Video.

While switch-maker Cisco is a newcomer to data center servers, Dell already places third in the overall blade server rankings with a 9% market share, according to analyst group IDC. But although much less so than Cisco, Dell still has a long way to go to catch up with market leader Hewlett-Packard with its 58% share, and IBM with 22%.

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At customer events today in San Francisco, London, Dubai, and Sydney, Dell is taking the wraps off of blade servers, storage systems and other products aimed at grabbing a larger share of the data center market, an arena that Cisco entered just last week.

More specifically, Dell's new products include five new EqualLogic PS 6000 storage arrays and the NX4 network-attached storage (NAS) system, along with M-Series blade servers, Precision workstations, two new service offerings, and the Dell Management Console, a console designed for managing both Dell and non-Dell data center hardware.

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Maybe it was thanks to its surprisingly popular Super Bowl commercial featuring an alien Alec Baldwin, or maybe it's thanks to its clean interface and ever-growing library of content, but Hulu's popularity exploded last month.

According to comScore's Video Metrix service, Hulu became the fourth most-viewed video site on the Internet, bypassing Microsoft, Viacom, and AOL sites, and snaring a 2.5% share of the market. The NBC-News Corp. joint venture climbed two positions in the ranking and experienced a 42% increase in views in February. The majority of the growth (33%) took place after the Super Bowl advertisement began running.

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If you happen to be in one of the 130 US Cities with T-Mobile 3G coverage, you're in luck. The perennial last horse in the 3G race today unveiled its first 3G USB modem, called T-Mobile webConnect.

The device is made by Chinese telecommunications equipment manufacturer Huawei, which specializes in UMTS/HSPA products, and due to the current sparseness of T-Mobile's 3G network, webConnect carries a modicum of additional features to add value.

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After releasing the voice-activated search application in November for iPhone, and then last month for Android with its RC33 update, Google has brought the functionality to BlackBerry users.

The feature works either with the Google Mobile App, or by simply navigating to http://m.google.com, and holding down the "talk" button to administer vocal searches. The Google Mobile app is available on all versions of BlackBerry running on O/S 4.1+ and voice-enabled searches only on O/S 4.2 and above. Additionally, the updated site also supports "My Location," which uses the phone's location data to automatically narrow down searches to results within a close proximity to the user.

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From time to time, Microsoft has announced its intent to build its Outlook component of Office into a more fully-featured system for organizing personal contacts, as well as doing some automatic background research into those contacts on the side. Last year, the company very nearly concluded a deal with a San Francisco-based company called Xobni that would have given Microsoft that functionality in one fell swoop, but that deal collapsed.

As it turns out, that's where the good news actually began for Xobni. It managed to obtain startup funding from such top-tier venture capital sources as Y Combinator, First Round Capital, Cisco, and now BlackBerry Partners Fund. Now, the company is prepared to remove the little piece of sticky-tape that says "Beta" from its principal product, which now becomes "Xobni 1.7" for the first time, though it remains a free download.

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Ever since Microsoft's innovative Windows Home Server operating system first appeared on the scene a few years ago, prospective users have asked why a Windows Media Center computer can't stream content from a Home Server-based unit. As early as January 2007, popular MSVP Chris Lanier (not a Microsoft employee) posed the question himself publicly, adding, "Microsoft would be crazy to not include access functionality to Media Center Extenders, but I think we all know that Microsoft is good at leaving out features that we all think should be there."

And a forum thread on the Media Center blog The Green Button on the topic of Media Center/Home Server integration, launched in December 2007, is still an active and vibrant discussion.

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TiVo announced this morning that it has inked a deal with Blockbuster to bring the company's streaming online rental service to broadband-connected Series2, Series3, TiVO HD, and HD XL set top boxes.

Blockbuster's OnDemand service will reside alongside Netflix on Demand, Amazon Video on Demand, CinemaNow and Jaman, undoubtedly making TiVo the strongest supporter of the streaming on demand model today.

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A brand-new site for mixtapes (or the virtual equivalent) has a charming interface, a fair database of tracks, and the ability for visitors to either play other members' playlists or search out individual songs. So does MixTape.me have a hope in hell of surviving where the legendary Muxtape ran afoul of the music industry?

Hard to say, but practical folk will check it out before much time elapses. Adam Pash, who daylights as editor of Lifehacker, pulled the site together from a raft of sources -- artist bios from Last.fm, lyrics from LyricWiki, videos from YouTube, and so on.

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While its rival Novell introduced the latest version of SuSE Linux Enterprise at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco, Red Hat -- the world's other major Linux distributor -- issued its tools announcement in conjunction with EclipseCon. The conference in Santa Clara focuses on the Eclipse cross-platform development environment.

The new JBoss Developers Studio 2.0 - Portfolio Edition (JBDS-PE) rolled out by Red Hat today is a major update to Red Hat's earlier Eclipse-based software development kit.

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PC gaming is a lifestyle. It's not like console gaming, where a user can just plop down in front of his TV, turn on a game for a couple of hours, and walk away satisfied. Side effects include fanatical hardware consumption and relentless resource tweaking.

The newest and most cutting-edge games demand the most from a user's system, and this drives PC gamers to have, at the very least, knowledge of what's newest in graphics, processing, sound, and peripherals. Moreover, it causes much of PC gamerdom to fall in the "power user" category, or those who put heavy demands on their computers for long periods of time. It's been that way since the dawn of the Sound Blaster, and many after school jobs been taken to feed the need for more gear. Of course, the PC gamers I grew up with also had part-time careers as electronics store shoplifters, but that's another story.

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As reported here earlier today, the release edition of SuSE Enterprise Linux 11 announced today is the first commercial product to feature Moonlight 1.0, the Linux-based runtime for Web sites released last month, geared to show video and graphics for Microsoft Silverlight 1.0.

But another of the immediate benefits that Linux users will be seeing is that sites with built-in WMV format videos, may play using Moonlight 1.0. For many users, it will be the first step toward something resembling ubiquity, as Linux users -- who note there aren't many, if any, sites developed "for Linux" -- will at last be able to run Web sites that clearly give off the appearance of having been developed "for Windows."

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