Can 11 million PS3s bring Sony CE back into black?
In an interview published over the weekend in Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Kazuo Hirai said he expects global PS3 sales to top 11 million by the end of March.
While hitting the 11 million mark won't put the PS3 above Nintendo and Microsoft, it does bring Sony closer to its rivals, which is important to encourage development on the platform. The company recently slashed the price of its software development kit.
Will powerline home networking finally sizzle at CES?
With iPod- and MP3-enabled home networked audio systems now launched by multiple vendors, and a major test by DirecTV reportedly set for early in 2008, will networking on powerlines actually start to shine at this year's CES?
With CES just a few short weeks away now, people are giving more thought to what trends we'll see. Some say that powerline -- a type of network that runs across inexpensive electrical wiring instead of cable, fiber or copper -- is finally starting to set off sparks right now.
Palm layoffs follow disappointing quarterly revenue
The same week it announced sharply lower revenues for its second quarter, embattled handheld device maker Palm laid off 10 percent of its workforce.
More than 100 Palm employees were given pink slips last week, according to reports, which the company later confirmed without offering a specific number. Palm counts a staff of around 1,150 worldwide, but is in the process of reorganizing its business following a tough year.
Perspective: I don't Knol
The problem with making democracies work is that any one point of view, way to work, or agenda for action can only garner enough support amid its multitude of alternatives that, at any one time, only a sizable minority can claim to be in favor of it. And the problem with making socialist societies work is that fairness, balance, equal distribution of wealth, and justice all require regulation, which by definition requires a regulator, which by design works against the socialist ideal.
The World-Wide Web is neither a democracy nor a social utopia. Certainly the fact that it is utilized by an astonishingly large plurality has been enough to excite people into believing it has the nature, texture, or substance of some kind of society. And time and again since its inception, individuals, institutions, and corporations have set forth some presumably historic measures to give the Web some type of perceived hierarchy, to capitalize on the wide recognition they receive by way of the Web and convert that perception into authority.
Comcast sues NFL to block slanderous emails
Comcast yesterday filed suit against the National Football League, claiming it was acting in breach of contract for encouraging Comcast subscribers to drop their service.
In e-mail blasts and on a dedicated Web site, iwantmyNFL.com, the football league attempts to rally its fans against cable companies who refuse to put the NFL Network in their basic cable packages. It has even gone so far as to encourage Comcast's subscribers to drop their service in favor of DirecTV and Dish Network satellite providers.
Is the Linux/Windows interoperability deal paying off for Novell?
The Linux vendor partners with Microsoft in one respect and takes it head-on in another. This time, the results aren't too pleasing as Novell suffers a small quarterly loss.
Major business software and services vendor Novell lost revenues during its most recent quarter -- but the company's sales rose rather substantially in the areas of identity and access management and even more markedly, Linux, a market where Novell astonished the IT industry a little over a year ago by taking Microsoft -- traditionally an arch-rival of Linux -- as a close partner.
Free remote PC access for iPhone and iPod Touch
Remote PC access software company Orb has announced support for iPhone and iPod touch, allowing users to stream their music, movies, and TV without being locked into iTunes.
To start, users must install Orb on their "always on" Windows machine, and then allow Orb to bypass any firewalls and anti-virus software. It then displays the media in the Windows default folders: My Documents, My Music, My Videos and My Photos. Other folders can be added at will by the user.
Online movie releases: the new 'straight to video?'
Jackass 2.5 from Paramount is believed to be the first studio-backed feature film to premiere online, and will be streamable for two weeks completely free of charge.
The Jackass movies essentially add a slightly larger budget to the MTV gross-out comedy clip show, stringing together a series of sketches into something of an anthology film. The 2.5 edition, which mixes new material with outtakes from the 2006 movie, reportedly cost a meager $2 million to produce.
Google marked by Chinese company for trademark violation
A Beijing company has taken Google's Chinese division to court over the search company's Mandarin name.
Google's name translates to "Guge" (goo-guh) in Chinese, which loosely means "Valley's Song." It was decided upon by Google's CEO Eric Schmidt from a list of 1,800 alternate choices, and announced on April 12, 2006.
Microsoft acknowledges Vista kernel elevation vulnerability
What was not supposed to happen in Windows Vista apparently has: Despite a layer of protection that was supposed to prevent against processes elevating their own privileges, Microsoft now says someone found a way to do it.
A Microsoft security bulletin written earlier this week but publicized this morning cites security software engineers SkyRecon Systems as having discovered a way for processes in both 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista to elevate their own privilege to administrator level.
Netherlands war against Microsoft advances on two fronts
A junior economics minister in the Dutch government has made significant inroads this week in his battle against Microsoft there, both in transitioning his government to ODF and in decoupling bundled software from PCs.
What Neelie Kroes is to the European Commission, Frank Heemskerk is fast becoming for the Netherlands Finance Ministry -- a rising star, especially for taking on popular causes. One such cause -- the battle against Microsoft's market dominance -- has won him support, and this week, the popular Economic Affairs State Secretary has cashed in some of his chips for political points.
Seductive Russian chat bot tries to steal your private data
From Russia, the land well-publicized for bringing the Internet questionable music service AllofMP3.com and mafia-related bank scams, comes a new kind of chat bot.
Called Cyberlover, the program is an application that claims to intelligently fabricate chat room dialogue that seduces its victims into sharing personal photos and phone numbers. In half an hour, the program can supposedly secure 4 to 6 "contacts."
How IBM could lead AMD to 32 nm
At this morning's analyst conference, AMD executives said they may scale back some on R&D. But earlier in the week, partner IBM unveiled a plan that could help fill the gap: a way to rework existing 45 nm parts designs for 32 nm.
Early this year, America's two leading semiconductor design firms, in fierce competition with one another to discover a material that could make smaller transistors possible, announced their accomplishments within mere hours of one another: Intel first, followed right behind by IBM.
The opportunities revealed by Sun's open-source CPU
By releasing the code for its new Niagara 2 processor into the open source community today, Sun is paving the way for its underlying architecture to eventually pop up in wireless and other embedded systems, and maybe even in future game consoles.
In announcing the open-sourcing of its multi-threaded Niagara 2 processor today, Sun Microsystems is looking at expanding the underlying computer architecture into new markets -- a strategy that earlier reaped successful results around both Sun's earlier Niagara 1 processor and IBM's open sourcing of its own Power processor architecture.
Mapping services find themselves today's hot commodity
Two major global information system (GIS) and satellite imagery acquisitions were announced on Wednesday, illustrating the continuing desirability of such services to both hardware and software manufacturers.
First, Nokia's acquisition of Navteq for a reported $8.1 billion dollars is nearing completion. The Finnish mobile phone company already uses Navteq as its mapping supplier, and considering Nokia's expectations of GPS phone ubiquity, the purchase was unanimously welcomed by Navteq shareholders.
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