Latest Technology News

Often, organizations don't really know how much open software is installed in their organizations, or what security and licensing problems might lurk within. The latest edition of Palamida's software addresses this looming issue.

At the Interop conference in New York City this week, Palamida Software is launching the latest edition of its product for locating open source code in organizations and identifying associated licensing issues and security vulnerabilities.

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Following recent discussions between the two companies that caused speculation regarding a merger, Samsung has made a public cash bid for SanDisk shares.

On September 4, shares in storage company SanDisk quadrupled in value after a Samsung spokesman noted that there were yet unresolved talks between the two companies. Spokesman James Chung said, "We are considering various opportunities regarding SanDisk, but nothing has been decided."

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It's no secret Microsoft's Zune player has Wi-Fi built-in, but besides a feature that the company had originally intended to call "dee-jaying," there hasn't been much else you could do with it. Zune owners, you deserve a break today.

With the latest firmware update to Microsoft's Zune music players, the company disclosed last week, listeners will be able to stream music directly from the Zune Marketplace Store without having to download and purchase it first. Today, we learned more about how that streaming capability will be put to use: Wi-Fi services provider Wayport will be working with long-time partner McDonald's Restaurants to implement streaming capacity directly with customers' Zunes over 802.11.

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The Internet Movie Database, known in the vernacular as imdb, has launched a beta update of its site featuring full-length movies and television episodes, in a move that may draw attention to its Withoutabox video monetization service.

Amazon's IMDb, the premier resource for information on actors' movie and television appearances, is now making full-length movies and television episodes available on its Videos site.

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An independent Android developers' blog reports having received an official invitation from carrier T-Mobile to cover a press conference in New York City Tuesday morning, where the first Android-powered phone will be unveiled.

A screenshot of the invitation appears on Android Authority this afternoon.

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Cray debuted its smallest and most consumer-oriented "supercomputer" today, the CX1, which will sport Intel Xeon chips and Windows HPC Server 2008. Available immediately, this low end unit embodies the changing state of power computing.

The CX1 chassis has enough room for eight blades of single- or dual-socket Intel Xeon processors. In today's presentation, Cray said the current peak configuration for the chassis is 64 cores with 3.4 GHz bus working at 786 gigaflops. Each chassis can be connected to up to 4 TB of storage.

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The definition of just how free is "free" is once again the subject of debate, triggered this week by the inclusion of a typical-looking end user license agreement from Mozilla Corp. amid the setup for recent builds of Ubuntu Linux.

At issue, for the most part, is this: Can a private interest claim intellectual property rights to certain trademarked elements of code that are distributed as part of an open source package protected by the General Public License?

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3:10 pm EDT September 16, 2008 - A spokesperson for Sonic Solutions told BetaNews this afternoon that DVD videos burned with Qflix drives, including the one sold by Dell, may very well be readable in other brands of console- and PC-based DVD players, although the one way to know for sure is to check for a Qflix logo.

According to Qflix literature, the presence of the logo on a device means it has been Qflix-certified. A warning posted on Dell's Web site yesterday, on the day its external Qflix DVD burner was released, explicitly says that discs burned on that device may not be viewable through players that don't have the Qflix logo.

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Version 2.0 of VMware's Fusion -- a rival to Mac-based desktop virtualization software from Parallels -- adds a new virtual machine control console along with the ability to run multi-OS applications on up to ten monitors.

A day after making a major move into cloud computing, VMware announced today that Fusion 2.0 -- a new edition of its Mac-based desktop virtualization software for running Mac OS, Windows, and Linux applications -- has left beta and entered general release.

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The European Commission yesterday gave permission for Sony to buy full ownership of Sony BMG, turning the former joint venture with German media conglomerate Bertelsmann AG into a Sony property.

In August, joint partner Bertelsmann agreed to sell its stake in Sony BMG, turning the rights to all but about 200 of its artists to the re-named Sony Music Entertainment Inc. (SMEI). This gave Sony 100 percent control of the label. Bertlesmann is said to be earning $1.2 billion in its divestiture.

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With greater market share comes greater responsibility; and now the maker of the operating system that analysts believe put Apple back among the US' top five PC producers, finds itself busy addressing some very old-style security holes.

An issue with null pointer dereferencing is among 26 security holes addressed by Apple in its latest Mac OS X 10.5.5 update package, and the details of that little problem are being revealed just today. Usually programs that are terminated clean up after themselves, but if you can find a way to terminate a program cold, it leaves behind pointers to memory that can be abused by malicious users.

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Yesterday, the upper house of the European parliament proposed an update to the now 12-year old Information Technology Agreement (ITA) that eliminates customs duties and tariffs on the export of tech hardware.

The proposal to update the agreement comes just over three months after Japan, the United States, and Taiwan (Republic of China) filed complaints with the World Trade Organization that the ITA is no longer current, claiming that duties continue to be levied on products whose definitions are not included in the document which should otherwise render them exempt from tariffs.

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In an update to his LinkedIn profile, Wei-han Lien seemed to confirm that in-house development on a custom ARM processor for the iPhone is now under way at Apple, in a move that could eventually save it millions.

Is Apple planning to save money on future iPhones by developing its own version of an ARM chip? Evidence from an Apple engineer's LinkedIn profile certainly seems to support that possibility.

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In a highly anticipated move given that Japan and North America have already been treated to price cuts, Microsoft UK is relieving the burden for British gamers, dropping the basic 60 GB HDD-equipped Xbox 360 to £169.99.

Microsoft confirmed to BetaNews this morning that a wave of price cuts that began two weeks ago in Japan and then followed up the following day in the US and Canada, has now officially reached Europe. Beginning this Friday, customers should expect to see price drops of about 15%.

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Microsoft may be "talking the talk" of cloud computing, but VMware and Citrix are already "walking the walk," with new strategies and products launched today at the VMworld conference in Las Vegas.

VMWare and Citrix handily trumped Microsoft's recent virtualization announcements today by unveiling detailed and comprehensive "cloud" strategies and product families for creating virtualized data centers in both enterprise locations and outside hosting sites.

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