Motorola puts a green jacket on a carbon-neutral handset
In the latest attempt to assuage consumers into buying more new stuff by telling them it's good for the environment, Motorola has announced a cell phone that it says is made out of recycled water bottles and is carbon-neutral.
"Through an alliance with Carbonfund.org, Motorola offsets the carbon dioxide required to manufacture, distribute and operate the phone through investments in renewable energy sources and reforestation," reads a company statement this morning announcing the company's new Motorola W233, dubbed the "Renew." "The phone has earned Carbonfund.org's CarbonFree Product Certification after an extensive product life-cycle assessment."
Microsoft elevates Bob Muglia's role in a changing company
The man who brought new life to the Server and Tools division, and who now challenges Ray Ozzie as the future prince of company keynotes, is being rewarded with an upgrade to his role that places him on a par with Dr. Qi Lu.
Up until recently, Bob Muglia's role at Microsoft has been to lead the Server and Tools division, making him effectively the fellow in charge of both Visual Studio and Windows Server -- two of the company's four pillars, besides Windows client and Office. (Frankly, SQL Server should be added to that list, and Muglia heads that project too.) Muglia has also been a member of the company's Senior Leadership Team, making him jointly responsible for corporate strategy. After today, none of those facts will have changed.
Microsoft claims Xbox 360 sold 8 million more worldwide than PS3
Once again just before CES week, Microsoft is claiming victory in the game console race, at least against rival Sony PlayStation 3. And once again, veteran analyst Sharon Fisher pores over the numbers.
When I was a kid, I used to love word problems. You know, "Sally is 6 years older than Jane, and Jane is twice as old as Margaret. If the ages of all three add up to 21, how old is each girl?"
Lenovo intros multimedia PCs for gaming, dual-screen laptop
With the exception of the high-end, business-oriented ThinkPad W700ds, all of Lenovo's product rollouts at this week's CES 2009 will be aimed at consumers, company officials told BetaNews.
At CES 2009 this week, Lenovo is launching an all-in-one desktop and three new notebooks, all geared to multimedia entertainment and gaming. The Chinese-based computer company, spun off from IBM a few years back, is also upgrading its W700 ThinkPad with an optional slide-out second screen and its S10 subnotebook with social networking software.
New HP Pavilion notebooks go for style, go with AMD
HP has had a reputation for delivering sturdy, competent, but unexciting hardware without a lot of pizzazz in the marketing department. As folks used to say, if HP was selling sushi, they'd market it as "cold, dead fish."
Well, somewhere along the line, Hewlett-Packard appears to have swallowed a marketing person, because the press releases for their new line of Pavilion notebooks -- including a competitor to Apple's slimmer-than-slim "Air" -- all gush about how stylish they are.
Jobs-less Macworld offers up 17-inch MacBook Pro, variable iTunes prices
Expectations were moderated after the king of the keynotes stepped aside for what he admitted yesterday to be health problems. But at a quieter, gentler Macworld, the crowd did get something to take home.
For perhaps any other company than Apple, the expectation of a world-changing product at least twice per year, if not more frequently, might be too much to ask. At what appears to be the final Macworld conference with which Apple will directly participate, Steve Jobs' stand-in, Apple SVP for Marketing Phil Schiller, showed off some software updates -- specifically, to the iWork and iLife software suites -- before premiering a new widescreen edition of the MacBook Pro.
Samsung goes solidly green
At this week's Storage Visions 2009 Conference on Tuesday, Samsung announced that it's preparing to ship a 100 GB solid-state drive with fresh green credentials.
The announcement indicates that the Samsung SS805 is expected to ship this quarter. Geared toward data-center servers, the drive has a random-read speed of 25 Krpm and a random-write speed of 6K. The company says that the drive can process as much as 100 times as many input/outputs per second (IOPS) per watt than a comparable HDD-based drive.
HP sets fire to Voodoo DNA with sleeker Firebird desktop
If the venerable desktop PC platform has any real "homebase" of customers left, it's in the enthusiast market where "cool" refers more to looks and performance rather than, say, CPU temperature.
Laying down the gauntlet ahead of CES 2009, whose first official day is tomorrow, HP this morning unveiled a slew of PCs, including a slimmed-down version of the power-packed Blackbird 002 that we profiled in September 2007. The new Firebirds will be available in two configurations, though whereas choice and extensibility were the themes for the Blackbird, the Firebird clearly appears geared toward a more budget-conscious enthusiast who may be just happy enough to be able to enter the "coolness" bracket.
Disgruntled IT guy fells blogging site
It's better than having some jerk walk back in with a gun, but it's sure not good: The journalspace.com blog site has shut down after a "disgruntled" former IT employee used his own data-backup choice to obliterate its entire data store.
Techish reader, would you rely on RAID as your sole "backup" structure for a mission-critical SQL server? That's what the now-former keepers of journalspace did. The chosen RAID setup wrote all data to two large drives, so in theory it was a perfectly redundant disk-array (not backup!) system; if one drive blew up, the other would hold everything and life would go on smoothly.
January phish buffet: Now with IRS
As regular as tax season itself, phishers pretending to offer information on an IRS "stimulus payment" are targeting thrifty (or is that greedy?) taxpayers.
The latest version of the scam, which is making the e-mail rounds as of Monday morning, travels under the subject line "Stimulus Payment form it's ready for you to submit." The message claims that "After the last annual calculations of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a Stimulus Payment," and includes a file that looks like a PDF...until you notice the extra ".htm" at the end of the file name.
Samsung announces HDTVs with Yahoo Widgets
The broadband-connected television market will be in full bloom at CES 2009, with Samsung announcing that its newest lineup of HDTVs will sport "Internet@TV", a Yahoo-powered widget interface.
The availability of TV-based widgets traces back to last year's CES, when Intel CEO Paul Otellini showed off the "Canmore" system-on-a-chip in televisions and set top boxes. Later on in the year, at the Intel Developers' Forum in San Francisco, Yahoo expounded a bit on the concept, adding its JavaScript widget engine to the Canmore architecture. Along with service provider Comcast, the companies discussed the Widget Channel distribution mechanism, and the various web-style applications that users would be able to load onto their televisions.
RIAA: MediaSentry relationship had already ended
In the second "deflation" of a Wall Street Journal story in as many months, an RIAA spokesperson confirmed to BetaNews this morning that the termination of its use of the MediaSentry service had already happened.
Among some of the more controversial aspects of MediaSentry -- a full-service protection system for media formerly used by members of the Recording Industry Association of America -- was its use of spoofing to fool unsuspecting users into visiting Web sites and downloading MP3s without authorization. Last year, a multitude of states reportedly revoked the licenses of MediaSentry to operate in their state, with some law enforcement agencies providing RIAA members with cease and desist notices. As it turns out, for the service to investigate unsuspecting users' computers as it does, it requires a private investigator's license in these states, reportedly including Massachusetts and Michigan.
Netflix and Amazon On Demand come to even more
Amazon today announced that owners of the formerly Netflix-exclusive Roku set-top box will be able to access Amazon Video On Demand, and LG announced it's building Netflix instant streaming directly into some of its upcoming HDTVs.
Video rental company Netflix is proving to be a genuine gateway to streaming video content. Today, Amazon announced that its Video On Demand service will be hitting Roku players early this year, adding nearly 40,000 more titles to the around 30,000 Netflix delivers to the diminutive box. Titles are pure H.264 streams (no downloading, since the Roku device has no storage) and will play back at 300, 600, 900, or 1200 kbps. Amazon says movies and TV shows will be rentable or buyable.
Apple's FileMaker launches revamped Mac and Windows database
At MacWorld today, Apple's FileMaker, Inc. subsidiary will launch a major overhaul of its flagship database for Mac and Windows desktops and servers, a product used by 70 of the world's Fortune 100 corporations.
"This is the biggest change to FileMaker in a decade," said Ryan Rosenberg, vp of marketing and service about FileMaker 10, a largely revamped database for Mac and Windows slated for rollout at Macworld today.
So it was a health problem after all, admits Steve Jobs
Addressing the recent announcement that he will not deliver the Macworld keynote this year, Apple CEO Steve Jobs released a statement this morning about his mysterious health condition.
Jobs' health has been an issue of considerable interest to the Apple community, and indeed to the tech community at large. Jobs' now gaunt frame causes some level of discourse at each of the CEO's public appearances, and the intensity of the rumors is only aggravated by Apple's secretive nature.
© 1998-2025 BetaNews, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy - Cookie Policy.