Software Blog

Endeavour Lifts Off to Fit ISS With Giant Observation Deck

admin — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:54:45 +0000

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 Taps Green Power With New Chips, Servers

admin — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:36:57 +0000

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 Rejiggers Small-Biz SaaS Security

admin — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:00:00 +0000

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.

Tune-Up App Lets You Get More Intimate With Your Mac

admin — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:00:00 +0000

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.

Open Symbian: New World Order or Big Yawn?

admin — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:00:00 +0000

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.

How Microsoft Could Beat Apple and Google: Needed – One Child Executive

admin — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:00:00 +0000

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.

Facebook’s Virtual World War II Memorials

admin — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 13:00:00 +0000

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.

The Critically Complex World of Cars’ Sparky Bits

admin — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 13:00:00 +0000

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.

How Cozy Are Google and the NSA?

admin — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 19:54:05 +0000

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.

The E-Book Empire Strikes

admin — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:11:35 +0000

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.

Eyeing Android, Symbian Opens Up

admin — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:25:39 +0000

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.

TweetCaster for Android Gets Almost Everything Right

admin — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 13:00:00 +0000

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.

Don’t Stomp on the Bookworms, E-Publishers

admin — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 13:00:00 +0000

Apple’s new iPad is apparently going to let me download The DaVinci Code — either in book or movie form. I like that. If you’re going to release a new device and charge me a lot of money for it — not to mention the costs of using a network of some kind to facilitate all that downloading and streaming — then please don’t get between me and my instant media gratification. However, I’m a little wary about all the deals being made between book publishers and Apple, not to mention the negotiations that continue between Amazon and those who supply the e-books for its Kindle.

Breakthrough Could Lead to Cure for AIDS and Other Deadly Viruses

admin — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:14:00 +0000

Viruses have long been the bane of the medical world. For centuries, healthcare experts have struggled to treat everything from virus-induced sniffles to lethal epidemics. At the very core of the problem is the constant emergence of new viruses and the continuous flux of old ones. It doesn’t help that even the strongest antibiotics are impotent against even the weakest virus. This is why the recent discovery of a new broad spectrum antiviral treatment is nothing to sneeze at.

US Intel Chief Paints Dark Picture of Cyberattack Defense

admin — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 19:53:26 +0000

As the United States’ private and public sectors increasingly leverage the Internet, the U.S. intelligence community fears that they are severely endangering the country’s critical infrastructure. On its own, neither the public nor private sectors can combat this threat, U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told Congress this week during an annual threat assessment briefing on national security. “Malicious cyberactivity is occurring on an unprecedented scale with extraordinary sophistication,” he said.

Motherboard Madness and Mayhem

admin — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:00:00 +0000

Misery loves company, as the saying goes, and nowhere is that more evident than on the Linux blogs. Case in point: Linux Planet’s Carla Schroder recently told a woeful tale about her attempt to upgrade the CPU on her ECS motherboard, and it has inspired a vast outpouring of sympathy from geeks far and wide. “My nice new Phenom X3 CPU worked beautifully at first,” Schroder wrote. “The whole system was more stable, and I could do things in Audacity that I couldn’t before, like 32/96 recording. But the good times did not last, and after a couple weeks of happiness it croaked.”

NotifyMe Needs to Up the Nag Factor

admin — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:00:00 +0000

For some types of personalities, a simple to-do list is all that’s needed to keep things on track. They don’t need reminders; they check their notes on their own accord. They don’t like being bugged about stuff, so please get off their case already; they know what they’re doing. Others need a little more prodding, goading and hammering. Maybe they’re absent minded, incredibly busy, or just the type of worrier who sleeps with three alarm clocks set at five-minute increments.

Can’t We All Just Get Along? Post-Merger IT Integration

admin — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:00:00 +0000

Enterprises that have merged with or acquired the systems and assets of another company know how difficult it is to combine disparate systems — platforms, databases and software solutions — with its existing infrastructure. Mergers can be very disruptive, especially if the companies have standardized on differing platforms, protocols and encryption methods. Some of the issues inherent in combining systems, software and processes can be eliminated by replacing multiple legacy file transfer solutions with a single, platform-independent managed file transfer solution.

Twitter Smells a Password-Snatching Rat

admin — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:10:59 +0000

Twitter users have come under attack from scammers once again, and the microblogging site has asked several users to reset their passwords. This latest attempt came through torrent file-sharing sites that contained hidden security exploits and backdoors. Opinion is divided as to whether these security holes were the result of bad coding or, as Twitter claims, were deliberately created so the coder could later activate them. Twitter noticed a “sudden surge” in followers of a few accounts over the five-day period leading up to Tuesday.

Obama Gazes Past the Moon to Mars

admin — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:58:53 +0000

President Obama on Monday proposed a dramatically new path that would end NASA’s Constellation moon program and shift the agency’s focus to developing new technologies for deeper space exploration instead. “We were not on a path to get back to the moon’s surface” in a reasonable time frame, NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden explained while presenting the proposed budget for fiscal year 2011. “As we focused so much of our effort and funding on just getting to the moon, we were neglecting investments in the key technologies that would be required to go beyond.”

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