Archive for April, 2009

Intel Faces $1.3B Fine In Europe

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

Hugh Pickens writes "European antitrust regulators, who have been aggressively pursuing what they see as anticompetitive practices among technology companies, could impose their largest fine ever in a market-dominance case against Intel. The commission began investigating Intel in 2000 after Advanced Micro Devices, its arch-rival, filed a complaint. In two ...

Can Avatars Make Contracts?

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

edadams sends in a story about the legal questions that are starting to crop up over property disputes in virtual worlds. A lawsuit in March 2008 that stopped one Second Life user from selling a virtual product created by another user marked the beginning of a significant amount of casework ...

"Miraculous" Stem Cell Progress Reported In China

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

destinyland writes "In China's Guangdong Province there's been "almost miraculous" progress in actually using stem cells to treat diseases such as brain injury, cerebral palsy, ataxia and other optic nerve damage, lower limb ischemia, autism, spinal muscular atrophy, and multiple sclerosis. One Chinese biotech company, Beike, is now building a ...

Windows 7 Will Be Free For a Year

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

Barence writes "Microsoft is effectively giving away Windows 7 free for a year with the launch of the Release Candidate. The Release Candidate is now available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers, and will go on unlimited, general release on 5 May. The software will not expire until 1 June 2010, ...

Firefox Beta Scores 93 On Acid3 Test

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

CodeShark writes "Mozilla released their latest Firefox 3.X beta today (3.5b4), and increased their score on the Acid 3 test to 93 [on my XP laptop], with tests 70, 71, and tests 75-79 being the final challenges. Curiously though, the current release of the top Acid3 performer — Safari — ...

Web Analytics Databases Get Even Larger

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

CurtMonash writes "Web analytics databases are getting even larger. eBay now has a 6 1/2 petabyte warehouse running on Greenplum — user data — to go with its more established 2 1/2 petabyte Teradata system. Between the two databases, the metrics are enormous — 17 trillion rows, 150 billion new ...

What Kind of Data Center Can You Build With $500M?

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

coondoggie writes "So, if the government gave your company $500 million to spend on building a new data center what would you buy and how would you build it? Well, the Social Security Administration is about to find out. As part of the stimulus bill, or the American Recovery and ...

Hundreds of Black Holes Roam Loose In Milky Way

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

sciencehabit writes "From Science: 'Astronomers suspect that hundreds of medium-sized black holes are roaming loose in the Milky Way. These rogues, according to a new study, are the orphaned central black holes of the many smaller galaxies that the Milky Way has swallowed over its billions of years of existence.'"

Forrester: PC power management still not widespread in IT

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

Most IT professionals, according to a survey conducted by Forrester Research Inc., aren't managing PC power use within their organizations, even as many companies look to cut costs because of the economic recession. By not doing so, they may be passing up big savings, especially in regions with high energy ...

ioquake3 1.36 Goes Gold

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

Time Doctor writes "The de-facto standard in Quake 3 engine technology, ioquake3, has hit version 1.36 recently. It includes a garbage bag full of improvements: in-game VOIP; optional external Mumble (voip); OpenAL; IPV6; anaglyph stereo rendering; Full x86-64 architecture support; Rewritten PowerPC JIT compiler, with ppc64 support; new SPARC JIT ...