Micron, Oracle settle memory price-fixing lawsuit
Micron Technology has reached an agreement to settle a lawsuit filed by Oracle over an alleged conspiracy to increase DRAM prices, it said on Thursday.
The terms of the settlement were not disclosed.
The lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California alleged a conspiracy to increase DRAM prices and other violations of federal and state antitrust and unfair competition laws based on purported conduct for the period from Aug. 1, 1998 through at least June 15, 2002, Micron said. Read more...
Adobe auto-update eases Flash update chore – on Windows only
Adobe has introduced an auto-updater for its Flash software packages that reduces the chore of updating the widely-used application by automating the process for all supported browsers on Windows machines. Previously users had to apply individual updates to Chrome, Firefox and IE add-ons and plug-ins, a process that often went neglected, leaving systems open to attack. Read more...
Gnome 3.4 brings a bevy of big changes
Roughly a year after the launch of Gnome 3, the project's developers have unveiled Gnome 3.4, the second major update to the controversial desktop environment.
Newly added features in Gnome 3.4 include video calling, a new documents search facility, a new virtual machine and remote access application, smooth scrolling, new application menus, Windows Live online account integration, and a new animated background that adjusts its brightness over the course of the day. Read more...
How IBM manages 80,000 bring-your-own devices
IBM CIO Jeanette Horan has plenty of IT projects and systems to worry about, but perhaps one of the most pressing and timely is Big Blue's ongoing BYOD (bring your own device) rollout, which is aimed at including all of the company's 440,000 employees over time.
The IBM workforce is "hugely mobile," with many working at client sites, home offices, and other locations outside corporate buildings, Horan said in a recent interview at IBM's office in Cambridge, Mass. IBM has long had a corporate managed mobile phone plan that historically has focused on BlackBerrys, she said. Read more...
BlackBerry maker to focus on business customers
Struggling BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd. said Thursday that it plans to return its focus to its corporate customers after failing to compete with flashier, consumer-oriented phones such as Apple's iPhone and models that run Google's Android software.
The shift in strategy came with a management shakeup that includes longtime executive Jim Balsillie leaving the board and severing ties with a company he helped build and later see decline.
RIM said it will focus its consumer efforts on targeted offerings that tap the company's strengths. That includes devices that employees will want to buy on their own and bring to the corporate environment. The company was exploring partnerships and other opportunities for consumer products that aren't deemed central. Those products could include software and features that are then incorporated into RIM's own offerings. Read more...
Apple pledge could lead to China wage hikes
A pledge by the manufacturer of Apple's iPhones and iPads to limit work hours at its factories in China could force other global corporations to hike pay for Chinese workers who produce the world's consumer electronics, toys and other goods.
Foxconn Technology's promise comes as Beijing is pushing foreign companies to share more of their revenues with Chinese employees. It follows a report by a labor auditor hired by Apple Inc. that found Foxconn was regularly violating legal limits on overtime, with factory employees working more than 60 hours per week. Read more...
School punishes Filipino boys for Facebook kissing
A Philippine Catholic school is withholding the diplomas of six high school boys who uploaded Facebook photos that appear to show them kissing one another, an education official said Friday.
A day earlier, a Philippine court rejected another Catholic school's decision to bar five girls from graduation ceremonies because they had posed in bikinis for photos posted on Facebook. The cases test the limits of privacy in a conservative Catholic nation that is also among the world's most prolific users of social networking sites.
Department of Education officer Samuel Mergenio said the six boys told him they had taken prank photos to make it appear that their lips touched. One of the boys uploaded the pictures on Facebook and mistakenly made them available to others, Mergenio said. Read more...
Wikipedia’s Next Big Thing: Wikidata, A Machine-Readable, User-Editable Database Funded By Google, Paul Allen And Others
Wikidata, the first new project to emerge from the Wikimedia Foundation since 2006, is now beginning development. The organization, known best for its user-edited encyclopedia of knowledge Wikipedia, recently announced the new project at February’s Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Berlin, describing Wikidata as new effort to provide a database of knowledge that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike.
There have been other attempts at creating a semantic database built from Wikipedia’s data before – for example, DBpedia, a community effort to extract structured content from Wikipedia and make it available online. The difference is that, with Wikidata, the data won’t just be made available, it will also be made editable by anyone. Read more...
Google ships Chrome 18, patches bugs and boosts hardware acceleration
Google yesterday patched nine vulnerabilities in Chrome and boosted the speed and reach of the browser's hardware acceleration with the launch of version 18.
According to the company, Chrome 18 enables accelerated Canvas 2D on Windows and Mac machines with compatible graphics processor units (GPUs), and expands support for the WebGL 3D standard to older systems.
Canvas 2D acceleration has been part of earlier builds of Chrome, but this is the first time that Google has turned it on in a "stable" version of the browser. Read more...
London ambulances on second try with CommandPoint 999 software
The London Ambulance Service has quietly phased in its CommandPoint 999 dispatch system.
The service began using the package, built by US defence giant Northrop Grumman, at 3am on 27 March. The introduction follows three live tests in the past few weeks and decommissioning of the previous in-house ambulance dispatch software.
A LAS spokesperson told The Reg that so far there have been no reported hiccups, although the new tech is regularly monitored for problems.
The Big Smoke's service believes lessons have been learned from the first abortive attempt to deploy CommandPoint in June 2011 and that problems have been corrected. Read more...
Amazon Web Services updates Linux implementation
Amazon Web Services has upgraded the Linux image that runs in its cloud to include newer versions of Tomcat, MySQL, and Python, while at the same time allowing enterprises to stay on older versions, the company said in a blog post on Wednesday.
Allowing enterprises to run different versions of applications and programming languages has been one of the major goals with version 2012.03 of the Amazon Linux AMI (Amazon Machine Image). It allows code that relies on different versions to migrate from older AMIs with minimal changes, according to Amazon. Read more...
Distributors refuse to sell Raspberry Pi without CE mark
Have you been waiting patiently for your Raspberry Pi to turn up in the post? Me too. I was expecting to get it late last week, but a check on my order status shows it is on back order. But the reason for the delay isn’t just high demand anymore. The distributors of the tiny PC have thrown another problem into the mix: they are refusing to sell the device until it receives CE compliance. Read more...
Unreal game engine licensed to US government
The Unreal Engine powers numerous top-tier games like Mass Effect 3, Batman: Arkham City, and the Gears of War series. It appears that the newest Unreal Engine is going to be making an appearance in some unexpected places; specifically the US government. No, the folks in Washington haven’t been passing Xboxes around — get ready for Unreal-based simulations designed by the FBI, US Army, and other government agencies. Read more...
Microsoft joins Google in the race to speed up the web
The Internet Engineering Task Force is meeting this week to discuss the future of the internet, and ways to make it faster and more responsive. If Microsoft has anything to say about it, that future will involve the replacement of the familiar HTTP standard with something much faster.
The existing HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) is the computer language by which computers communicate with each other on the web. It's been the workhorse of the internet for over 15 years, but with the internet having evolved so much since, it's generally agreed by tech experts that a more modern, faster approach is needed — an HTTP 2.0, if you will. Read more...