Latest Technology News

Must every spreadsheet you ever use until the end of recorded time be an "Excel spreadsheet?" A protocol for making functional data more versatile for Web portals, so users can choose their own tools, is taking its next evolutionary step.

The definition of "portal" with regard to the Web changes by the year; and while sites such as Yahoo would like for it to still be somewhat synonymous with "home page," today, Web services engineers use the term to mean some central location where Web services can be used collectively. And though sites such as Google have tried to instantiate that vision by making JavaScript widgets collectible together through pages such as iGoogle, Web engineers today have a more functional vision in mind: They see the next "portal" as the network-empowered equivalent of yesterday's "desktop."

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Led by a 43 percent boom in PC notebooks, Dell's sales of products and services climbed to $16.08 billion over the company's most recent quarter.

At this time last year, analysts were talking about the greatness of Dell, Inc. in the past tense. Yesterday, what's past is present again, as the company's sales growth has exceeded industry averages across servers, storage and PC desktops, according to Dell CEO Michael Dell.

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auctionPAL.com, an online retail "middleman" , has set up a program where users auction off their goods with the proceeds going to relief efforts in Myanmar and China.

The site joins the efforts of Web giants like Google, which offers its eponymous checkouts linked to UNICEF and Direct Relief International aid programs for the Myanmar cyclone.

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Since last November, NBC has been developing a service separate from its Hulu venture for downloading shows after they've aired, and watching them offline. But the initial beta suffered setbacks, so now it's gearing up for a second try.

NBC is expected to launch its NBC Direct online download service sometime in the next two months, in an effort to iron out as many problems it can before launching the service publicly this summer.

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Giving credit to industry deals with Microsoft, SAP, and Hewlett-Packard, Novell reported a year-over-year sales jump of 31 percent for its Linux software in its quarterly financial results yesterday.

"Overall, product revenue was up 7 percent year over year, driven by our three growth businesses: Linux, identity, and systems management," said Novell CEO Ronald Hovsepian, in a conference call held with financial analysts to discuss Novell's results for its second fiscal quarter of 2008, which ended on April 30.

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During Memorial Day weekend, Internet TV network Revision3 was brought down by a denial-of-service attack traced back to anti-P2P company MediaDefender.

Revision3 CEO and former PC Magazine editor-in-chief Jim Louderback provided a detailed report about the DoS attack on his P2P streaming program service, and the distinct trail of packets leading back to MediaDefender.

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In one more demonstration that it's taking a different stance with regard to the intellectual property it uses, Microsoft has dropped its objection to an IEEE working group making use of a Web services protocol it developed for Vista.

Removing a roadblock that might have continued to prevent an alliance of printer and tools manufacturers from implementing a Web services-based specification for document scanning devices, Microsoft announced yesterday it will go ahead and provide its Scan Service Definition 1.0 for Web Services on Devices, to the IEEE's Printer Working Group.

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After South Africa voiced its objections to how the Open XML standards ratification proceedings were conducted, the standards bodies of both India and Brazil are registering similar complaints.

The IEC has confirmed that it received two additional appeals from India and Brazil before the deadline. A fourth country is said to have considered filing an appeal, but the standards body has not confirmed this, and declined to say how many appeals it had received.

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Can the recent plague of technical problems affecting text communications service Twitter be blamed on the language on which its platform was designed? Earlier, the company said no...but some within the company are hinting otherwise.

Two weeks ago, following the rapid spread of rumors that the Twitter service -- recently besieged with technical troubles -- may be abandoning the Ruby on Rails development platform in building a replacement platform for itself, the company's co-founder Biz Stone flat out refuted those rumors in a comment to BetaNews.

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The update to Apple's operating system fixes a multitude of its security vulnerabilities, but some users are reporting issues with graphics and Adobe CS3 after upgrading.

Along with fixing issues with incorrect fonts, video and audio playback, and wireless network connectivity, at least two dozen security issues were patched.

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Members of Google's Android team leveraged Google's I/O conference this week as a launch platform for demos of new Android features, ranging from an application launcher called Notifications to a compass-based StreetView application.

The Android mobile development will probably become available in the second half of this year, said members of Google's Android team at the company's I/O conference in San Francisco this week, who gave a first-time demo of an Android prototype device.

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As the Beijing Olympics approach, the testing deadline draws nearer for a technology infrastructure which has been built exclusively for the games by Lenovo. So the company is staging a dress rehearsal.

Lenovo reports over 30,000 pieces of its equipment will be used (desktop and notebook systems, servers, monitors, etc.) during the 2008 Summer Olympics, with some 580 of its engineers working on site.

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An effort to effectively benchmark the relative speed of OpenOffice applications has turned up evidence that its applications have become slower with each new version.

Users wanting to break away from Microsoft Windows and Office have had little viable alternatives when looking for competing products. Many of those interested in something other than Microsoft Office have chosen the OpenOffice suite of software, which offers programs and services similar to Microsoft's software suite.

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The PostScript era may at last have shuffled off its mortal coil, as the next generation of Adobe's printing workflow and reproduction system for PDF gets set to roll out to OEMs this summer.

At one time -- longer ago than it sometimes seems -- the software print engine of the modern world was based around PostScript, and Adobe was on top of the world as the champion of that format. The first editions of PDF were perceived as not so much an encapsulated PostScript but as an abbreviated alternative to it, mostly for ordinary text documents. But as that standard evolved into the format of choice for Web-based brochures and marketing literature, its capability to reproduce images and graphics eventually exceeded that of PostScript.

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Visitors to Comcast's Internet portal were greeted with a cryptic message for several hours overnight Thursday.

Checks by BetaNews indicated that the problems as a result of the hack were continuing even into Thursday afternoon, including problems with accessing Web-based e-mail and the company's support forums.

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