CorinneI writes “In a way inconceivable in today’s marketplace, Usenet was where people once went to talk — in days before the profit-centric Internet we have today. The series of bulletin boards called “newsgroups” shared by thousands of computers, which traded new messages several times a day, is now a thing of the past.”
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eldavojohn writes “Red Hat’s CEO prophetically saith ‘The clouds will all run Linux’ in a brief interview before the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo. Here’s the skinny: Red Hat management tools take a back seat to grid computing goals, high switching costs are the trick to surviving slow periods, Microsoft’s interoperability tools are vaporware, they’re striving to catch up to VMWare, Ubuntu is not the competition, JBoss is growing twice as fast as RHEL and Amazon pays the fee while Google wears its own Red Hat for free.”
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Universal Serial Bus 3.0 is just around the cornet, but it does not mean that its brother IEEE 1394 standard (also known as FireWire and iLink) has ceased its development. In fact, this month the 1394 trade association said that it had ratified the 1394-2008 specification, which significantly improves bandwidth of the interconnect.
The 1394-2008 high performance serial bus standard updates and revises all prior 1394 standards dating back to the original 1394-1995 version, and including 1394a, 1394b, 1394c, enhanced UTP, and the 1394 beta plus PHY-Link interface. It also incorporates the complete specifications for S1600 version with 1.6Gb/s bandwidth) and for S3200 version, which provides 3.2Gb/s speed.
View: The full story @ DigiTimes
Seagate Technology leads a thriving hard-disk drive (HDD) industry, driven by demand for low-cost, high-capacity storage devices, according to analyst iSuppli. Unlike the Nand flash chip industry, HDD vendors resisted the worst of the economic slowdown by learning to control their costs, argued Krishna Chander, senior analyst for storage systems at iSuppli.
The industry also got lucky with rising demand for more storage in PCs because new applications call for more HDD capacity. The threat of solid-state disk has not materialised yet, as HDD offers a cheap practical answer to today’s challenges, i-Suppli added. “Provided demand for low-cost storage capacity keeps rising, the HDD industry will find ways to deliver,” said Chander. In the first quarter of 2008, HDD vendors shipped 137 million units, up 21 per cent year on year.
View: The full story @ vnunet
Carphone Warehouse's ongoing network integration prompted by its purchase of AOL's broadband business in 2006 could spell trouble for tens of thousands of customers, CEO Charles Dunstone warned today. In the firm's Q2 trading update, he said: “We have successfully migrated over 1.3m AOL customers: a further 80,000 customers, whose operating systems or hardware are incompatible with the new platform, are yet to be migrated and a proportion of these are likely to be at risk.”
Carphone has already lost 12,000 AOL customers as a direct result of the migration. We've asked the firm which specific hardware and software set-ups are under threat and will update this story if we get an answer.
View: The full story @ The Reg
Web giants such as Google and Facebook should pre-screen user content before it goes online, since offensive material threatens the Internet's overall health, according to a U.K. government report released Thursday. The recommendation comes as social-networking, video-sharing and other Web sites battle problems with cyberbullying, violence and offensive material.
Thereport, from the House of Commons' Culture Media and Sport Committee, advocates assigning a government minister to oversee Internet safety as well as other issues such as P-to-P (peer-to-peer) file sharing and targeted advertising systems. Google depends on users to report offensive videos on YouTube and removes bad ones that have been flagged within the hour, the company told the committee.
View: The full story @ PCWorld
JavaFX is the RIA technology from Sun. Sun is behind others in the RIA space, including Adobe and Microsoft, but is looking to make up for lost time through its expertise in the Java community.
Sun Microsystems is rolling out the preview release of JavaFX, its rich client platform for building RIAs (rich Internet applications). Sun made the announcement July 31 and made the JavaFX Preview release available here.
The JavaFX Preview release provides Web scripters, designers and Java developers with a preview of the runtime and tools needed to create RIAs on the Java platform. Developers can download the JavaFX Preview release, explore the code samples and tutorials, start writing JavaFX applications and provide their feedback to Sun , said Jacob Lehrbaum, senior product line manager of JavaFX for Sun.
View: The full story @ eWeek
Asustek Computer plans to launch more Eee PCs designed to address different market segments, according to company president Jerry Shen. Shen said he anticipates the netbook and Mobile Internet Device (MID) markets will offer substantial business potential in the future generating demand as high as one billion units based on forecasts by Intel. He also noted that Intel is expected to keep shipping Atom N270 CPUs through late second quarter 2009 implying notebook vendors will have consistent processor support.
View: The full story @ DigiTimes
An anonymous reader writes “Citizens of the world are striking back at 24/7 state surveillance by pulling out their cameraphones and filming inept officials, deadly healthcare lapses and thuggish cops. So-called Sous-veillance is seeing more and more people posting damning footage of official misdemenours to sites such as YouTube to shame them into action.” I wonder what happens if you inform a cop that you are recording him when he pulls you over.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Symantec , the largest maker of computer security and data backup software, reported higher quarterly profit Wednesday, beating Wall Street expectations, as it signed more large contracts. It also said it may beat analysts' profit forecasts for the current quarter, which ends Oct. 3, helping to send its shares up 4.5 percent. “We have good visibility and a strong pipeline coming into the quarter,” Chief Executive John Thompson said in an interview.
Symantec expects to report profit excluding items of 34 cents to 36 cents per share in its current fiscal second quarter. Analysts expect it to report profit of 34 cents, according to Reuters Estimates. The company's sales are benefiting from recent changes to the way its sales force approaches business customers, cross- selling security products with data backup programs and storage software.
View: The full story @ CRN