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...
RIM pushes BlackBerry 10 kit out to thousands of devs on 1 May
Attendees travelling to Orlando for BlackBerry World will get their hands on alpha-release hardware as RIM seeks to seed the developer community ahead of a commercial launch.
The hardware won't be the finished article, but RIM reckons it's close enough for devs to start making applications. The Canadian firm will be handing out several thousand devices to developers attending BlackBerry World in a move described as "unprecedented". Read more...
AMD buys SeaMicro, enters server hardware business
Advanced Micro Devices announced Wednesday it is buying low-power server vendor SeaMicro, a surprise move that puts AMD in the systems business and disrupts Intel by acquiring one of its close partners.
AMD will pay $334 million in cash and stock for SeaMicro, a 40-employee Silicon Valley startup that has gained attention for building highly dense and power-efficient servers for use in large-scale cloud computing environments. SeaMicro CEO Andrew Feldman will become general manager of a new division at AMD, the Data Center Server Solutions group.
AMD plans to sell SeaMicro-branded servers directly to customers, but it bought the company primarily for its technology, which it hopes to license to other server vendors to build their own low-power systems, AMD officials said. Read more...
Amazon accidentally starts shipping the PS Vita early
A few gamers in Canada eagerly awaiting the launch of the PS Vita got a welcome surprise this week when their pre-ordered Vita’s arrived in the post.
The official launch of the PS Vita hardware is split between the first edition bundle, available from February 15, and the standard Wi-Fi and 3G editions coming the week after on February 22. However, someone at Amazon in Canada messed up, or at least someone with access to the shipping system did, and started sending out the stock early. Read more...
RIM offers $99 PlayBook to employees, Best Buy stops selling them
So, you’re looking to boost interest in a nice piece of hardware that’s been overlooked because of a competitor’s product? Just cut its price by 60%, like RIM has done with the BlackBerry PlayBook. Still not satisfied with the results? Why not get the people who work for you to help evangelize the darn thing and get as many out into the wild as you can.
That’s got to be what RIM is thinking, dangling $99 PlayBook tablets to its employees just in time for the biggest gift-giving season of the year. Pick up a slate for your mom and dad, the kids, or even your co-workers for the big staff holiday party. Read more...
Lenovo claim world’s smallest desktop PC with IdeaCentre Q180
The image you see above is Lenovo‘s IdeaCentre Q180 desktop PC. It’s tiny. So tiny in fact, Lenovo is claiming this is the world’s smallest desktop PC.
The Q180 measures just 155 x 192 x 22mm, but inside you’ll find quite a healthy combination of hardware. At its core is an Intel Atom D2700 dual-core processor running at 2.13GHz, coupled with 4GB DDR3 RAM and an AMD Radeon HD6450A GPU with 512MB of dedicated memory. Hard drive sizes go up to 750GB or 128GB for the SSD option. As you’d expect, it runs Windows 7 (Home Premium or Professional).
In terms of connectivity you get 4x USB 2.0 ports, 2x USB 3.0 ports, VGA and HDMI-out, and an 8-in-1 card reader that supports SDXC. As Lenovo intends the Q180 to be sat next to your TV, it also has up to 7.1 surround sound and a wireless multimedia remote that combines keyboard and mouse functionality.
The stand it sits in is also cleverly designed. It can be flipped upside down to support either a complimentary DVD writer or Blu-ray drive sitting next to it while retaining the overall look of the machine. Read more...
Apple inspires Oracle on hardware-software combo strategy
Oracle's strategy of launching hardware-plus-software appliances - known as engineered systems - finds inspiration in the successes of Apple, according to the database giant's CEO Larry Ellison.
The company launched its first engineered systems with the Exadata database machine and middleware system Exalogic some years ago, subsequently adding Database Appliance and Exalytics in recent weeks. During his keynote at the company's annual OpenWorld event, Ellison cited Cupertino's approach to making both hardware and software inhouse. Read more...
Oracle OpenWorld’s burning questions
Oracle's OpenWorld conference, which kicks off Sunday in San Francisco, could be the biggest one yet for the company, which entered the hardware game last year through the purchase of Sun Microsystems and is closing in on $40 billion in revenue.
But the bigger the company, the more questions it has to answer about its future directions and past promises. The tens of thousands expected at OpenWorld and its sister JavaOne conference will be in search of all the details.
An Oracle spokeswoman declined to comment on the company's planned announcements for OpenWorld, but through interviews with industry experts, reasonable speculation and some digging, here's a look at some of the most important questions facing Oracle going into the show. Read more...
AT&T center to tap into Silicon Valley talent
AT&T set up shop in Silicon Valley on Wednesday with its Foundry Development Center in Palo Alto, a facility where software and hardware developers can get help bringing their inventions to the real world.
The site is AT&T's third Foundry Innovation Center, following ones opened earlier this year in Plano, Texas, and in Israel. But the carrier has high hopes for meeting promising startups in the hotbed of U.S. technology.
AT&T wants to free developers from the hassles of dealing with technology on the back end of AT&T's infrastructure, such as billing and location functions, so they can finish their applications and make them work on the network more quickly, said John Donovan, the carrier's CTO. Read more...
Back to the future with a joystick for the iPad
A few weeks ago, I wrote a column pointing out how innovation in games is a different beast to innovation in hardware. New mobile hardware is released on a yearly basis, but you rarely see the sort of leap in hardware tech that you see from a home console. Clearly, it’s a good thing peripheral developers don’t listen to me, because a couple of joystick adapters made specifically for the iPad could cause a sea change in mobile gaming.
It’s funny to think of a joystick as a game-changing device, seeing as it’s such an essential part of console gaming, but for a largely touch-based game platform, going back to the future with some old-school tech from Logitech, complete with construction so the joystick snaps back into place like the real deal, might open up a whole new gaming avenue for app developers. Read more...
You like Flash, you like cache: Put ‘em together to form …
Wasting no time in following the trend, Fusion-io has integrated recently-acquired ioTurbine flash caching software with its hardware to create ... ioCache.
Fusion bought IO Turbine in August and its ESXi plug-in software looks after a cache for virtual machines in a VMware server. Now Fusion has bundled a 600GB flash memory card with ioTurbine software.
Fusion's Virtual Software Layer (VSL) virtualises the company's flash cards into a single pool of storage. The ioTurbine software uses an O/S subsystem in VSL as a store to "house and serve data for each VM". The firm says: "Integration of VSL's host-based flash management and ioTurbine's cache management eliminates otherwise redundant mapping functions, maximising I/O performance." Read more...
Why I bought a $99 HP TouchPad
Well, I did it: I took the plunge and bought one of those dirt cheap HP TouchPads. As a happy owner of a Motorola Xoom, you wouldn't think I'd be in the market for a new tablet -- especially one that's just been given its last rites -- but over the weekend, like thousands of other technophiles, I found myself shelling out a hundred bucks for a discontinued and critically panned gadget.
Crazy? Maybe. But I had my reasons.
First, though, in case you've been living in a cave the last few days (or, you know, just somewhere without Internet access), let me catch you up: HP recently announced it would stop making its TouchPad tablet. Then on Saturday, the shockwave hit: The company launched the sale of the century to get rid of its remaining TouchPad inventory, with the normally $499 32GB model selling for $149 and the normally $399 16GB version priced at just 99 bones. Read more...
Mozilla mobile OS may face future patent battles, says expert
Mozilla's plan to create a mobile operating system will probably face patent challenges, one expert said, while another called it "too little, too late."
Yesterday, Mozilla announced a new project dubbed "Boot to Gecko" (B2G) that it hopes will lead to a "complete, standalone operating system for the open Web."
Although B2G will feature new Web-based APIs (application programming interfaces) that let developers access device hardware to make calls, send texts, take photos and more, Mozilla plans to use bits of Android, including the kernel and device drivers, at the outset.
That could leave Mozilla open to the kind of intense patent litigation Android now faces, said Florian Mueller, an independent patent analyst whose blog FOSS Patents is closely followed by both patent professionals and and technophiles. Read more...
A Trojan Horse that looks like an App Store: Has Apple found its way in to the enterprise?
Here are four words I never thought I'd be writing: enterprise technology vendor, Apple.
However, looking at the company today, I don't think it'll be too long before those words have a real ring of truth about them. Sure, say it quietly so it doesn't disturb those buying Apple kit for its consumer-cool factor, but there's no escaping the fact that if Apple continues on its current path, we'll be swapping out our standard-issue office kit for hardware emblazoned with glowing fruit.
A couple of years ago, you'd never have caught me admitting to such heresy. Apple, CIOs often said, made some nice gear, but wide-scale adoption would simply be too expensive and a move from a Wintel architecture too disruptive.
Why should the business landscape be any different now? The increasing adoption of bring-your-own-IT naturally has a part to play, inviting the increasing number of Mac and iPad users out there to introduce their kit to the workplace. However, consumerisation is a trend at the start of its life and few organisations are happy to allow consumer technology through the gates to any significant degree. Read more...
Ballmer’s new chant: Numbers, numbers, numbers
Microsoft lost its title as the world's biggest tech company this year with Apple surging ahead in market cap, profit and revenue.
Yet Microsoft still has ammo in the numbers department to take shots at its biggest rival, and many others, besides.
CEO Steve Ballmer focused heavily on numbers proving rapid adoption of Microsoft technology -- with the exception of Windows Phone 7 -- on Monday as the company's Worldwide Partner Conference kicked off in Los Angeles.
Windows 7 has sold 400 million licenses in less than two years, Office 2010 has sold more than 100 million licenses, 50,000 businesses have trialed Office 365 since the cloud service's launch two weeks ago, Windows Server locked up 75% of quarterly hardware shipments, and usage of the Bing search engine has tripled in the past year. Read more...