Latest Technology News

Global data centers are finding themselves unable to implement potentially energy-saving initiatives because doing so may require short bursts of energy that exceed caps imposed by power companies, said one Sun official yesterday.

UNITED NATIONS (BetaNews) - In a twist of interlocking ironies, data centers worldwide are finding themselves incapable of implementing initiatives that could reduce their energy consumption over the long run, because their short-run requirements exceed the caps imposed on them by their power companies.

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A heavily promoted performance test by an evaluation software firm appeared to situate Windows Vista SP1 performance against Windows XP SP3. But the initial workloads were actually different due to the Office software used, testers admitted to BetaNews today.

Devil Mountain Software's test results comparing similar workloads on systems with varying editions of XP and Vista -- including the latest service packs or their equivalents -- show the Vista system performing astonishingly more poorly, by a staggering 144%.

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Sales of the PlayStation 3 have rocketed 298 percent since Sony introduced its cheaper $399 40GB model on November 2, but much of that boost may be attributed to Black Friday, when such increases are typical.

The news follows a similar positive week in Japan, where the PS3 outsold Nintendo's Wii for the first time. Still, Sony has a long road ahead if it hopes to catch up to the Wii globally; Nintendo has sold twice as many consoles as its Japanese rival.

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In a heartfelt plea to a conference on IT corporate responsibility for the environment, Zimbabwe's UN ambassador urged more must be done to help modernize countries such as his, so that they can participate in the effort to save the planet.

UNITED NATIONS (BetaNews) - Zimbabwe has a staggering 87% nationwide literacy rate. You read that correctly; it's among the highest in all of Africa, and its youth literacy rate is even higher. But the true miracle there is that technology plays so little of a role in that success, said Ambassador Boniface G. Chidyausiku to a UN conference of IT industry leaders in New York City this afternoon.

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"We will allow customers to connect any device that meets our minimum technical standards, and be activated on our network," announced VZW CEO Lowell McAdam this morning.

It finally happened, either the inevitable or the impossible depending on your point of view: A major US carrier has committed to opening up its existing cellular networks to access by the customer's choice of devices, assuming they comply with basic technical requirements. With that comes the customer's choice of applications, and the mobile operating system on which they run.

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TiVo's Stop||Watch, an advertisement system especially suited for time-shifted viewing, has received its first major supporting content provider: NBC Universal.

Lately, the corporation's NBC network has been adopting many new media formats in the apparent hope of finding the next source of big ad revenue. Its rush seems to include everything short of offering to tag logos on the side of passing trains.

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American IT firms are already hard at work reducing greenhouse gas emissions and reducing energy expenditures, some of their leading representatives told the United Nations today. Among their cases-in-point are server virtualization and remote printer management.

UNITED NATIONS (BetaNews) - A recent IBM project to move the processing power of some 3,900 of its own enterprise servers onto 30 mainframes has already saved the company $450 million in operational expenses and $30 million in additional energy costs, according to Rich Lechner, IBM's vice president for IT optimization. Lechner, along with several other industry executives and diplomatic leaders, spoke at a conference on the technology industry's responsibility for the global environment today at the UN in New York City.

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The two companies will need to pay Michigan-based z4 nearly $160 million in total penalties for infringing on the company's rights to patents surrounding anti-piracy technologies.

z4's technology provided a method for software to be activated once it is installed. The same technology could also be used to deactivate the software in an effort to deter piracy.

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After a nearly five year wait, Google's long rumored "Gdrive" storage service appears set to take on similar offerings from Microsoft and AOL, according to media sources.

Rumors of such an offering began in earnest last year when the leaked notes to a presentation from CEO Eric Schmidt made a reference to a Google storage platform in March. However, the company would not comment and speculation continued.

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Environmental watchdog group Greenpeace believes this holiday's top-selling consumer electronics devices are produced by the least environmentally conscious companies.

Today, Greenpeace released its updated "Guide to Greener Electronics" which ranks the top 18 manufacturers of PCs, game consoles, phones, and TVs according to their policies regarding toxic chemicals and clean recycling. This holiday's top-selling consumer electronics devices are produced by the list's least environmentally conscious companies.

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The research firm says that radio stations are complaining that the samples used were too small to produce reliable ratings data.

Arbitron still uses the over four decade old paper diary method of calculating ratings. The new system will electronically measure what people listen to.

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Speaking at an official United Nations function in New York this morning on technology and climate change, a DOE official denounced the world's data centers for their role in contributing to global climate change.

UNITED NATIONS (BetaNews) - US Assistant Secretary of Energy for Energy Efficiency Alexander Karsner, speaking this morning before a United Nations conference on the technology industry's responsibility for the global environment, said that as the world's data centers become more clustered and crowded, they expend too much space and electricity and generate too much heat and emissions. As such, Sec. Karsner said, the typical enterprise data center has become "a center of enormous waste."

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On December 4, Microsoft will roll out an update to the Xbox Live Dashboard that adds a social networking type of feature to the service.

Citing the popularity of Facebook and MySpace, Microsoft believes that social networking tools have come to be expected in online communities. And with over 8 million subscribers interacting with one another on a daily basis, the ability to view who is friends with whom and make new friends accordingly seems like a logical feature to add.

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Though the final data for Cyber Monday retail sales have yet to be projected, more early indications point to a sharp rise in online spending.

The online retail price tracking service PriceGrabber.com reported 54% higher traffic yesterday over Cyber Monday 2006. Customers who purchase products from online retailers and who go through PriceGrabber to do so, get their purchases recorded; so for the first time, we know what it is that consumers appear to want most.

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HD DVD player sales are nearing the important 1 million milestone thanks to recent price cuts, but Blu-ray is claiming an early victory in Europe.

With current-generation players from Toshiba now under $200, the HD DVD Promotions Group saw a sharp uptake in sales in November and says over 750,000 players are now in the hands of consumers. This number includes both standalone devices and the HD DVD add-on available for Microsoft's Xbox 360.

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