Following a day’s delay due to cloudy weather, space shuttle Endeavour launched successfully early Monday morning from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The shuttle, which launched at 4:14 a.m. EST, is carrying a new module and an attached cupola for the International Space Station. “What a beautiful launch we had this morning… the orbiter performed extremely well,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for space operations, during the postlaunch news conference. “This is a great start to a very complicated mission.”

IBM on Monday launched a one-two punch with its new Power7 processors, which the company claims have twice the performance of the Power6 line but consume less power. These processors power IBM’s Unix servers, four new models of which were also unveiled Monday in a move that might strengthen IBM’s position in the Unix server market. The Power7 uses a 45 nanometer process. Each Power7 processor has up to eight cores and four threads per core. That’s four times the maximum number of cores and eight times the number of threads per chip as the Power6.

Trend Micro on Monday announced a new and completely overhauled version of its Software as a Service for small and medium-sized businesses. The new version, named “Worry-Free Business Security Services,” replaces “Worry-Free Business Security Hosted,” which was launched only 10 months ago. “This is a new solution built from the ground up,” Dal Gemmell, senior manager for product marketing at Trend Micro, told TechNewsWorld. Trend Micro also introduced several new features to the SaaS product that were initially available only in its enterprise solution.

It’s been both a boon and bane for the Mac that it has some characteristics of an appliance. For some users, “it just works” is what makes Apple computers so much more attractive than their competitors. Others, though, just feel incomplete unless they can get under the hood of their byte box. For them, there are programs like MacTuneUp. MacTuneUp, which was recently updated to version 3.6, is a suite of utilities for improving system stability and the performance of a Mac.

It’s not every day that a major operating system gets opened up, never mind one that leads the global market in its category. So, when the news came out last week that that’s just what the Symbian Foundation had done — and four months ahead of schedule, no less! — it was hard not to get excited. Android is no longer the only big kid on the open source mobile block, it seems, and the scales are now tipped considerably more in FOSS’ direction.

The iPad has captured much of the technology coverage so far this year. It is a poorly named copy of a product that Microsoft launched nearly a decade ago, based on a concept Steve Jobs personally thought was stupid: the tablet computer. Yet Apple has effectively convinced the market that its device is new, different and desirable. Microsoft had Flash before Adobe; it had a touchscreen phone before the iPhone; and it effectively had an iPod touch before there even was an iPod. In all cases, the problem to overcome wasn’t competitive — it was institutional stupidity.

Henio Zytomirski’s Facebook profile picture stands out from most. The grinning 6-year-old is captured in black and white and poses in an old-fashioned buttoned-up shirt and shorts. The photograph, shot in 1939, is probably the last taken of him before he was murdered in the Holocaust. A group in the boy’s hometown of Lublin is using the social networking site to breathe virtual life into Henio’s stolen childhood and give people around the world the chance to get to know him — as well as mourn the millions of others killed by Nazi Germany.

Your most expensive piece of electronics probably is not your flat panel TV or your computer. More likely, it’s your car, which can pack 50 microprocessors to control everything from the fuel mix to the rearview mirrors. The recalls and other technical problems besetting Toyota in the last few weeks highlight the risks of relying on electronics instead of the mechanical rods and cables that controlled vehicles for most of the 20th century. Such advancements bring many benefits, but the worry is that the car is a computer on wheels that could freeze up and potentially crash.

Google has allegedly requested help from the National Security Agency in tracking down hackers who attacked its infrastructure. The development has raised concerns among privacy advocates. The Washington Post broke the story that Google had turned to the NSA on Thursday, citing anonymous sources. Security experts and privacy advocates have questioned Google’s motives. Some have warned that this could constitute another attack on American citizens’ civil liberties.

Apple held most of the music industry virtually at knifepoint for years, and that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially if you were a consumer who wanted a legal way to get popular music at a fairly reasonable price. It was only about a year ago that iTunes let go of its dollar-store policy and allowed for a little leeway in its pricing. True, that leeway amounted to only a few cents per song, but the point is, for a very long time, it was the distribution channel dictating prices, not the publisher.

When the Symbian Foundation announced the opening up of its namesake smartphone platform on Thursday, it caused a major shift not just in the mobile landscape but also in the FOSS world. Announced by Nokia back in 2008, the transition of the leading platform from proprietary code to open source was completed four months ahead of schedule and is the largest in software history, the foundation said. “The development community is now empowered to shape the future of the mobile industry,” said Lee Williams, the Symbian Foundation’s executive director.

Those who say there are no decent Twitter apps for Android simply haven’t found the right one. When the Android Market first opened, you could sign in, watch the handful of new apps being uploaded every day, and generally know everything that was available on the platform. There really were only a couple of Twitter clients. Now that the Market has been revised — and there are more than 25,000 apps by the last unofficial count from Androlib — there are plenty of Android Twitter clients to choose from.

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