Hewett Packard must have IBM envy. They've purchased Ross Perot's old technology services company, Electronic Data Systems, for $13.2 billion, so they can claim to be the second place provider of such services to businesses and government, behind IBM. As usual, the first rule of Takeover Club is: you're fired. It's a field dominated...Read more...
The amount of bad publicity generated from a single financially motivated decision can sometimes be approximately as harmful as the loss the company was taking. Case in point:“New Orleans is about to lose its municipal Wi-Fi? network? as EarthLink plans to halt its participation in the citywide project on May 18, an EarthLink spokesman said...Read more...
If you thought your own passwords were secure, then you haven’t seen anything yet. There is an interesting bug in Windows 2000 SP1 and Advanced Server that occasionally produces (and enforces!) the following error:“Your password must be at least 18770 characters and cannot repeat any of your previous 30689 passwords. Please type a different...Read more...
Just in case you missed it, we're writing to let you all know that we have just posted a new article here at HotHardware in which we evaluate the features and performance of Lenovo's sleek ThinkPad X300 ultra portable notebook. According to Lenovo, the ThinkPad X300 was designed to be the most efficient notebook the company has ever...Read more...
While he may not have invented the Internet, Al Gore has played a major role in bringing the issue of Global Warming to the masses. In his book and movie "An Inconvenient Truth", Gore made a compelling case, and whether his message convinced you or not, one thing is certain, it's clear people were listening. Today, there...Read more...
When we heard about a Vista Home Premium upgrade edition bundled with OneCare stuffed into a box that looked like it belonged to Hello Kitty, we were naturally wondering if we ate some bad seafood. Here's more:“As a special promotion for the Japanese market, an upgrade version of Windows Vista Home Premium is bundled with a year’s subscription...Read more...
Never being ones to shy away from poking a bit of fun at excessive censorship, we'd like to posit that China will ban the kitchen sink sooner or later. Thus far The People's Republic of China has banned pornography, YouTube (several times only to be unblocked later), freedom of speech on forums and e-mail, and now mapping web sites.“Eight...Read more...
There is no official report from AMD on the wires, but multiple news outlets are reporting that chipmaker AMD will show 5 percent of its workforce the door. AMD is slated to begin shipping quad-core Phenom 9850, 9750, 9650, 9550, and 9150 processors in the coming weeks, according to sources close to the company. The "50" branding scheme indicates...Read more...
Swedish authorities have been threatening this since last month. They kept their promise.The Swedish prosecutor Hakan Roswall has announced the charges against four individuals involved with The Pirate Bay. The four, aged 23 to 37, are being charged with “assisting copyright infringement” of 4 software applications, 9 films and 22 music...Read more...
We received some news from Lenovo that we thought would interest you all. Lenovo representatives informed us that Novell SLED 10 is now available on the ThinkPad T61 and R61 14-wide notebooks based on Intel Centrino processor technology, giving customers yet another opportunity to select a system with an operating system that will best...Read more...
The rumors of Paramount dropping HD-DVD in favor of Blu-ray were dispelled - at least temporarily - earlier in the week when Paramount flatly denied it was leaving the HD-DVD camp. But here we go again.Daily Variety has confirmed that Universal's commitment to backing HD DVD exclusively has ended. And Paramount has an escape clause in its...Read more...
It is no secret that in the printer market, the money is all in the consumables. Paper, ink, and the like are where the money is made, not printers themselves. As such, a Boston man has filed a lawsuit against Staples and HP on collusion and anti-trust grounds.A Boston man has filed a class-action lawsuit accusing hardware maker...Read more...
The US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled in favor of Google in a suit brought by Perfect10, who offers internet pictures of women who have forgotten some or all of their clothes. The images are copyrighted, but the Google search engine displays thumbnail images in search results. And people using the search engine to view...Read more...
Google seems to be interested in everything even tangentially associated with their main business, which is selling web ads to display while they find stuff you're looking for. They've been granted an interesting patent recently, one that shows just how far down the road they think about things: Google Magazine.Consumers may purchase a variety...Read more...
Japanese consumer tastes make for interesting analysis because they have a tendency to be early adopters for most kinds of tech hardware. The Japanese canaries in the worldwide silicon goldmine are signaling a profound change in consumer tastes right now: they've stopped buying personal computers.It's clear why consumers are shunning PCs.Millions...Read more...
Lenovo just announced their second fiscal quarter results, ending Sept. 30th. Quarterly revenue jumped 20% to $4.4 billion, with pre-tax income of 125 million, up 177%. With results like these, Lenovo is convinced it no longer needs to rely on IBM branding for their Think series of products, and they plan to drop it two years earlier than...Read more...
Oink was taken down on Oct. 23rd, and --- who else but --- The Pirate Bay says it will bring it back, sort of.OiNK was taken down on October 23 by police in the Netherlands and Britain in conjunction with the IFPI and BPI, and a message on the site's front page indicates that an investigation was ongoing into the "identities and activities"...Read more...
The past 30 days has seen some major events in the global anti-piracy war: Demonoid (operating out of Canada) went off the air for a week or so, both Dutch & U.K. police had major network busts in their respective territories and now it appears that a joint operation have shut down OiNK.“OiNK distributed albums often weeks ahead of their...Read more...
Why would Silicon Valley, which birthed the idea of the cubicle, be moving away from it? Even Intel, which is often credited with the idea, is rethinking it.Cubicles can prompt odd behavior, people who have studied them said. It is hard to see if colleagues are busy, so some cube-dwellers will send emails to a neighbor about a simple...Read more...
Just two days ago Earthlink announced a layoff of 50% of its workforce Additionally, they announced that they felt they were going to re-evaluate their municipal wi-fi plans, which included (among other cities) citywide services in San Francisco. It seems re-evaluation has already taken place, as the San Francisco wi-fi plan, three years...Read more...
Earthlink has won a number of municipal wi-fi contracts, including San Francisco (!), but it still needs to find ways to balance its ISP business, which is struggling, with the high cost of building its municipal Wi-Fi and cellular phone businesses. The solution, at least for now, is a layoff. On Tuesday, EarthLink announced that it would...Read more...
Guarding sensitive data is an extremely complex task and often requires a skilled IT team that stays on top of modern technology. Of course, if your IT team does things like turning off firewalls in order to perform lengthy maintenance on servers (while leaving them connected to the internet), they might not really be a ‘good’ IT team to...Read more...