Last year, or I suppose it is now the year before last, we saw the Retrode , a little device that let you easily create ROM files from your SNES and Genesis cartridges. Useful, but sort of a one-shot device if you’re not a serious collector[......]
A new report by the Swiss government argues that unauthorized file sharing is not a significant problem, and that existing Swiss law—which allows for downloading copyrighted content for personal use—is sufficient to protect copyright holders. It considers and rejects three proposed changes: a French-style "three strikes" law, Internet filtering, and a mandatory collective licensing regime that would impose a fee on all Internet users that allowed unlimited file-sharing[......]
In addition to publishing original research, Science runs a series of Policy Forums that examine the interface between research and governance. [......]
The PC in 25 years The best way to predict what the future holds, they say, is to look to the past, but such a philosophy isn't necessarily the best option when it comes to computers. It's a useful way of extrapolating the numbers to see how fast the processors of the future may be; that's one reason Moore's Law continues to work. We can even use it to predict how much RAM future machines will have access to and how big hard drives are going to get, but given that the biggest changes to computers come in the way we use them, any predictions of the future would be better left to futurologists, industry wishlists and brief glimpses of roadmaps. [......]
For the last year, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has been at the center of a raging debate over the future of Internet access pricing. [......]
Almost every single keynote at LinuxCon, and certainly every private conversation I had with folks here, involved "cloud" in some way. As Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst observed in his keynote, there's no single definition of "cloud". [......]
Everyone, led by Vice President Whatshisname, wants to use their iPhone on the corporate network. Don't IT security people have enough problems? But the onslaught of unsecurable consumer devices in the enterprise is probably unstoppable. [......]
Microsoft announced today that Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V will be able to run CentOS, the popular free Linux distribution for Web servers. CentOS is one of the top three most popular Linux distributions for Web servers, and could account for as much as 9% of the Web whose host OS information is available, according to a 2010 study. Therefore, said Sandy Gupta, General Manager of Marketing for Microsoft's Open Solutions Group, support for CentOS was the most frequently requested interoperability addition from the community of hosters and service providers. [......]
In war, sometimes the best defence is a good offence. [......]
Being called "America’s fourth automaker" is good for stock prices. That’s what Tesla was recently labeled in a report from Morgan Stanley and it caused their stock to shoot up nearly 20% to close at $27.75. It also doesn’t hurt that they’re projected to hit $70 by the end of the year. [......]
When Microsoft announced the release of Windows 7 SP1 in early February, the company also released some information about a couple of upcoming products : Windows Thin PC (WinTPC) and Microsoft BitLocker Administration and Monitoring (MBAM.) Monday, Microsoft shared the first round of information about WinTPC, how it will fit in with volume licensing somewhere between Windows Virtual Desktop access (VDA), and Microsoft Software Assurance (SA), and why it is coming out in the first place. "Depending on the device and the capability, a thin client could cost as much as a low-end PC," Microsoft's Karri Alexion-Tiernan said on Monday[......]
Intel is trying to bolster profits in the low-end CPU market, but it’s a move that will make enthusiasts understandably nervous. Customers who purchase a desktop computer featuring the Pentium G6951 processor will be given the option to buy a $50 scratch coupon allowing them to unlock additional threads and L3 cache on the chip. To be clear this is very different from “binning†where a CPU gets reclassified after testing. [......]
Excuse us a moment while we die a little inside, an inevitable result of learning that teen pop idol Justin Bieber consumes 3 percent of Twitter's resources at any given time. Dude even has his own servers. [......]
By Joe Wilcox , Betanews Cloud computing dominated the morning's Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting 2010 presentations. COO Kevin Turner and Chief Research Strategy Officer Craig Mundie spent more time talking cloud computing than any other topic. For Mundie, it was a bold departure from previous years, where he spoke broadly and almost exclusively about forthcoming technologies -- typically years from release, if ever[......]
By Mary Kay Roberto, E-Commerce Times For years, IT departments have had full control over their own infrastructure -- for better and worse -- and are naturally uncomfortable with anything that prevents them from being the sole resource for their own infrastructure. They have been trained to maintain tight control because of the complexity of their own environment -- a positive trait that has helped to assure timely and accurate delivery, but limits their ability to accept change. It should come as no surprise, then, that IT often views data leaving its network as a negative rather than a positive. [......]
