Items tagged with ISE
I love internet startups. It's fun to watch the trajectory they follow, from not-half-bad idea through college dorm jury-rig setup to garage to venture capitalist office to front page news or bankruptcy, sometimes both depending on the details. Picky Pirate is a new website that serves as a meta-review aggregator and ranking system for reviews of available music, games, and movies, and then offers the user a one-click link to whatever torrents might be available for the desired content.Ehud, the developer of PickyPirate told TorrentFreak that a friend asked him why nobody created a mashup of BitTorrent and Metacritic, “I immediately thought ‘Hey, that’s a really good idea!’”...
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Perhaps the only person who could have challenged Bill Gates in this poll was Steve Jobs, and he gave it a good run, finishing a strong second. The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) polled 473 Information Technology (IT) industry professionals about the industry's most influential personalities of the past 25 years.Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corporation, claimed the top spot on the most influential list. Gates, who co-founded Microsoft in 1975, was named by 84 percent of the 473 IT industry professionals who participated in the web-based poll. Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, which he co-founded in 1976, placed second on the list of most influential IT person of the past 25...
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Just about everybody has heard some sort of interesting search-related fact that has to do with pornography on the Internet. First it was that searches for Jesus Christ came up with less results than the word porn on Google. Then it became a big deal to be 'bigger than porn' when it came to Google hits.But the number of search results doesn't accurately depict the number of searches on a subject, just the volume of related material. So who's 'bigger than porn' this week? According to Hitwise it's none other than Facebook, at least with one of its key demographics:"Perhaps a more interesting — and more accurate — way to figure out where college students are going online...
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While Google soared on increased market share and lower expenses, AMD posted a net loss along with increased costs. AMD, which competes with market leader Intel, said its third-quarter net loss was $396 million, or 71 cents per share, compared to a net profit of $136 million, or 27 cents per share, in the year-ago period. Revenue rose 23 percent to $1.63 billion, beating the average analyst forecast of $1.52 billion according to Reuters Estimates.Despite the loss, analysts are happy with the revenue being produced by AMD. Excluding charges related to the ATI acquisition, AMD's loss per share was 49 cents, better than the loss of 61 cents forecast by Wall Street....
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Apple's comeback and growth have been nothing short of amazing, but despite its hits, or perhaps because of them, it appears to many that customer service and quality have suffered.By broadening its share of the computer market and diving into whole new businesses, the company has become a case study in the challenges of taking a cherished brand with a devoted (some would say cult) following into the mainstream. Today, Apple is selling huge volumes of products to a much wider, and perhaps less patient, audience. The iPod, starting at just $79, has put its name in the hands of millions of mainstream consumers, many of whom, analysts say, have gone on to buy Macs and iPhones. In the most recent...
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Manhunt 2, which had already been rejected by UK censors once, was refused again in its revised form. The game was the first to be refused certification in the UK in 10 years. Its prequel has been accused of contributing to a schoolboy's murder.Rockstar submitted a revised version but BBFC director David Cooke said that "we do not consider that these [changes] go far enough to address our concerns about the original version."The impact of the revisions on the bleakness and callousness of tone, or the essential nature of the gameplay, is clearly insufficient."There has been a reduction in the visual detail in some of the 'execution kills', but in others they retain their original visceral...
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AMD made an announcement a few weeks ago that made many in the industry scratch their heads: AMD (not Intel) will release SSE5. This was quite confusing since AMD is known for their own set of instructions, 3D Now!, which the company has quietly dropped development of in favor or following Intel's lead with SSE instruction sets.One of the major reasons SSE was able to supplant 3D Now! is that Intel has one of the best software support divisions of any hardware company on the planet. While both AMD and Intel were able to release detailed documents on how developers could utilize their instruction sets, Intel went a step further and added automatic SSE optimizations to the compilers and libraries...
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Everybody wants a raise. But substantial wage growth depends not only on the value of the work you're doing, but also on a local shortage of people that can perform that work. It appears there's lots of IT work in Australia, and not enough people to do it, as IT salaries have gone up almost 12% in the last year alone."The survey taken over the past 12 months by one of Australia's largest IT recruiters, Greythorn Group, shows that Australian salaries in positions such as .Net development, business analyst, database administration and project management are matching and in some cases surpassing those in highly paid centers such as the US, UK, Hong Kong and Singapore. The report found that demand...
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You can bet Palm, Motorola, and any other smartphone makers broke out in a cold sweat today. This is just speculation still, but RIM shares are up $1 (at the time of this writing) over rumors that Microsoft is interested in buying the Blackberry manufacturer. "Microsoft has been mentioned as a possible buyer," said Frederic Ruffy, an analyst at options education firm Optionetics in California. "According to speculation, the software giant might be interested in RIM in response to Google's recent announcement that it is interested in making its own mobile phone operating system, which would compete with Windows Mobile," he added. Aside from the obvious impact on the...
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At one time Gateway was huge. It was big enough to compete with the likes of Dell, HP and Compaq. Yesterday, Acer bought Gateway, for the bargain basement price of $710 million. While $710 million is nothing to sneeze at, compare it to the $7 billion (with a B) that Gateway was once offered to become part of Compaq. What went wrong? A string of bad quarters, a revolving door into the chief executive's office and a schizophrenic business strategy have all led to Gateway's end as an independent company after 22 years in business. The economic downturn that began in 2000 hit Gateway particularly hard, and it never quite recovered. Its identity as a company was constantly in flux after that,...
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Subprime mortgage market? Stock market? What are you talking about? I was referring to BusinessWeek's report that municipal wireless networks are colossal money losers, and the companies that partnered with many cities and counties to offer it are tired of losing their shirt on expensive infrastructure and operating costs based on demand that never materialized. And so the taxpayers are being lined up to bear the cost of municipal Wi-Fi, whether they want it or not. For now, a tiny user base can't even begin to cover an operator's costs. Take Lompoc, Calif., population 42,000. The city deployed its 11.3-square-mile Wi-Fi network last September, at a cost of more than $2 million so far....
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Bank hacking is up, despite new & improved security measures and growing public awareness regarding internet security: “SecureWorks reported that between June 2006 and December 2006, they blocked attacks from about 808 hackers per bank per month. From the beginning of this year through June, there's been an average of 1,462 hackers launching attacks at each of the company's bank clients. As for the credit unions, SecureWorks reported blocking attacks from 1,110 hackers per credit union per month. That number rose to 1,799 this year.” What is the root of the increase in hacking? One of the key reasons is the virus kits that are readily available for purchase.It used to be that it took...
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The 6000+ isn't the end of the line for AMD Athlon 64 X2 after all. Dispite AMD roadmaps long foretelling that the Athlon 64 X2 product line as we currently know it would end with the 6000+, Digitimes is reporting that AMD is planning to release a new addition to the line-up. The new part will be badged as the 6400+ and will clock in at 3.2GHz with 2MB of L2 cache. This comes as a surprise since the 6400+ has not appeared on any AMD roadmap. However, some motherboard makers are supposed to have already recieved samples and the chips are expected to ship "shortly". "Currently, AMD's highest-end desktop processor is the Athlon 64 X2 6000+, however with its performance unable to match Intel's...
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WD ANNOUNCES 750 GB ENTERPRISE-CLASS SATA HARD DRIVES WD RE2 750 GB Hard Drives Deliver Cool, Fast, Reliable High-Capacity Performance LAKE FOREST, Calif. - July 17, 2007 - Addressing the needs for the growing enterprise market for high-capacity, highly-reliable storage, Western Digital Corp. (NYSE: WDC) today announced it will be shipping its WD RE2 (RAID Edition) 750 GB hard drive this month. With 3.0 Gb/s data transfer rate, WD RE2 hard drives feature Native Command Queuing (NCQ) and 16 MB cache for high system performance. "WD has continued to leverage its extensive experience from previous RAID Edition drives, to develop...
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As a result of the speculated rise in price of computer memory chips, shares of Samsung, Hynix, and other major producers rose today. Shares of South Korean company Samsung, the largest producer of DRAM in the world, rose 1.2% today, whereas the runner-up, Hynix, also based in Korea, climbed 4.3%. Other companies including Powerchip, Nanya, and Inotera experienced gains similar to Samsung’s. "Prices of the benchmark chip yesterday rose for the first time in a week on the spot market, helping fuel optimism computer makers are buying DRAM ahead of back-to-school and Christmas demand during the second half. Prices have plunged more than 60 percent this year, eroding earnings at companies such...
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If you're showing up at the Star Wars conventions in a plain old limousine or a Prius, listen up: for a fraction of the price of an AT-AT, you can now afford a JL 421 Land Cruiser, and get all the girls dressed up like Princess Leia in a metal bikini. And it's only $19,999.95 on Amazon. Order early, I imagine this item will dwarf the demand for the Apple iPhone. The JL421 Badonkadonk is a completely unique, extremely rare land vehicle and battle tank. Designed with versatility in mind, the Donk can transport cargo or a crew of five internally or on the roof, and can be piloted from within the armored shell or from an exposed standing position through the hatch, thanks to special one-way...
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You've got your CEO, CFO, Division Managers and so forth. CIO came with the importance of electronic communications and the internet. But now we add another title to the alphabet soup of corporate management: CSO, or Chief Security Officer. Research from the Economist Intelligence Unit shows the number of CSOs taking ultimate responsibility for the security of a business has almost doubled year-on-year. Although the CIO still has sign-off on security decisions in 30 per cent of organisations, 12 per cent of respondents said they now have a CSO who assumes that responsibility. This is up from seven per cent last year. Denis McCauley, director...
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Symantec estimates that computer hijackings have risen 30% in the last year. Crackers hijack computers in order to send out spam e-mails, viruses, and other malicious software and according to further studies from Symantec, more then a third of attacks in the second half of 2006 originated from within the United States. While the number of hijackings continues to increase, research indicates that the number of servers controlling 'bot networks' is decreasing. According to Symantec, bot network owners are beginning to consolidate servers in order to create a more centralized center for deploying malicious software. The number of computers...
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Open source information on the web has transformed the way we find out about things. How about some open source information on wages? The New York Times has a round-up of internet services where if you'll show them yours, they'll show you everybody's. Wages, that is. More extensive salary surveys are done for corporations, but a regular employee could not hope to buy the information from any of the other major compensation companies like the Hay Group or Mercer. "We wouldn't give it to you," said Iain Fitzpatrick, general manager of the reward information service division of Hay. The compensation companies do not want their information being used against bosses negotiating salaries....
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Tired of seeing billboards in the car, watching advertisements on TV, or listening to radio spots between you're favorite songs? Well if you are, bad news friend. Ads are making their way into video games and companies such as IGA Worldwide are making placing advertisements in games a profitable business. While this isn't necessarily a new concept, it is taking a whole new direction which may prove to bring in game advertising to a whole new level. See what the guys at Bit-Tech have to say about the subject here. In-game advertising, or IGA, is getting to be a potent buzzword in our industry. It also elicits some strong connotations - things like corporate greed, spyware...
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Seagate Technology today introduced the world's fastest hard drive -- the Savvio 15K drive, the new 15K-rpm addition to the Savvio family of 2.5-inch Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) enterprise drive solutions. The Savvio 15K drive provides the highest hard drive performance density and reliability while ensuring ultra-low power consumption, reducing thermal loads in data centers. With its combination of benefits that were created for modern storage systems, the Savvio 15K drive is well-suited for a broad range of mainstream enterprise applications in both large enterprise data centers and small, medium businesses, that lowers overall system Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). The Savvio 15K drive was...
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Well, we've determined that Sony can make at least one Playstation3. So we've got that going for us: Thousands of lucky gamers tested the PS3 over the weekend at the 2007 Sony Expo in Honolulu, two weeks before the debut. Almost all were males - from boys with braces and baggy jeans to gray-haired baby boomers. They crowded around two gaming booths with the sleek, lean, black machine behind a plastic case. "The graphics are crazy, way better than the second one," said Doug Morrison, a 20-year-old University of Hawaii student. "It's more realistic. It's smoother. It doesn't have any glitches." The article is slightly sketchy on details, but contains all the items Sony is hoping for,...
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