Archive for the ‘Tech News’ Category
You can't win them all, as the saying goes, and that apparently includes Linux fans. To wit: Despite the best hopes of many of us in the community, the man suing Sony over the removal of the "other OS" feature from its PS3 has apparently lost his case. The bad news is that the man won't get the money he had requested to compensate for an upgrade to his newly crippled PS3; the good news is that he reportedly wasn't forced to pay Sony's legal bill to boot. Linux bloggers were none too pleased with the news.
Apple on Wednesday made a host of announcements focused around music and entertainment. These included a revamped version of its Apple TV device, iTunes 10, a refreshed iPod family and new versions of its iOS mobile operating system. Overall, the announcements came as relatively little surprise, as most major points conformed with speculation and rumors that had arisen on the Web over the past few weeks. Although Apple CEO Steve Jobs drew cheers from the audience repeatedly as he made the announcements on stage, Cupertino may still face a long struggle ahead.
HP on Wednesday announced a restricted beta release of webOS 2.0, the operating system it acquired when it purchased Palm earlier this year. This is open to developers belonging to Palm's Early Access program. The beta adds several new features, and apps built with it will be released to all carriers that offer Palm devices, Palm spokesperson Alex Hunter told TechNewsWorld. Hunter added that webOS 2.0 will be available by the end of the year and "will be the most significant update we've done since launch."
The number of businesses moving toward virtualization is growing constantly, and together they will lead to an important change in the face of IT, according to to VMware President and CEO Paul Maritz. Speaking at his company's VMworld expo on Tuesday, Maritz told his audience that the focus will change from hardware efficiency to operational efficiency, that a new infrastructure will evolve, and that IT must figure out how this infrastructure will be consumed and paid for, among other things.
In my dumber days when I ran Microsoft Windows, I was more concerned with backup programs. After I moved into the Linux desktop, I became much less paranoid about system failures. The Linux environment just never crashed. That does not mean that I never make backup copies of my critical data files. It's just that I do not worry about the Linux OS crashing to the point that I have to reinstall everything from scratch. That was the nudge with Windows that pushed me to migrating to Linux.
Cloud computing, technology delivered over the Internet, has become a hot area in the last few years. The technology marketplace moves at breakneck speeds, but it is still shocking when innovation almost completely wipes out squabbles like those over open source vs. proprietary software. "In a cloud world, source code is almost irrelevant," Matt Asay recently wrote at GigaOm. Tim O'Reilly was among the first to point this out in 2008, when he said that "Architecture trumps licensing any time."
Google is reaching out to help those who just don't have the time to wade through hundreds of emails each day. The company unveiled Priority Inbox, an application that aims to automatically identify important incoming messages and separate them from more general, tedious emails. "It's about time," said Scott Steinberg, president and CEO of Digital Trends. "The vast majority of our emails are not pressing concerns. It shouldn't be difficult to prioritize these."
AutoCAD, a popular design and engineering tool from Autodesk, is returning to the
Mac after an absence of some 18 years. Autodesk is launching a version that runs natively on Apple's Mac OS X. To be released in October, it will cost US$3,995 without a support
subscription, and $4,445 with one. Autodesk is also releasing a free version of the AutoCAD application for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. The mobile iteration is not a
full-blown application. Essentially it will allow users to view, edit and share DWG -- AutoCAD's format -- files.
Trend Micro on Tuesday announced an agentless antimalware module for VMware virtual environments in its Deep Security 7.5 product. The company also announced on Tuesday that it's throwing open its Trend Micro SecureCloud beta to the public. Both products will protect data in the virtual environment as well as in the cloud. Deep Security 7.5 combines agentless antimalware with agentless intrusion detection and agentless Web application protection. Traditionally, security, monitoring and other apps that watch a computing environment plant a small agent into the apps they are watching.
BlackBerry maker Research In Motion has struck a deal with officials in India that will allow it to continue to operate in the country, for now. According to a statement by the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs, the two parties will conduct a 60-day trial of access methods that RIM has proposed so that the Ministry can monitor communications sent on RIM devices. The government needs such access to adequately conduct antiterrorist activities, it said.
