Articles by Chris Maxcer

Mobile phone powerhouse Nokia has acquired the small, privately held media sharing company Twango -- a 10-person outfit that currently works out of a cofounder's basement in Redmond, Wash Despite the company's small size and basement digs, Nokia clearly sees potential in Twango's solutions and vision....

The free software movement's most important license -- version three of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3) was unveiled by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) late last month. It comes roughly 16 years after its wildly successful predecessor, GPL v2, became one of the most used software licenses ever. Today, about three quarters of the world's free software packages are distributed under GPLv2...

Back in 1994, a computer called "Chinook" became the World Checkers Champion. By 1996, the checkers world came to accept that the computer was better than any other player. However, it wasn't until more than decade later that the Chinook achieved perfection Chinook is now certifiably infallible and can never lose a game, according to researchers wh...

MTV Networks' Nickelodeon Kids and Family Group will drop a cool US$100 million into its online casual games venture, the Viacom business unit announced Wednesday at the Casual Connect gaming conference in Seattle "Across all of MTVN's online sites, gaming is an important original genre and we are committed to delivering fresh content to our audien...

Yahoo reported financial results for the second quarter of 2007 Tuesday, bringing the company a rise in revenue over the same quarter of last year as well as a significant drop in profit Overall revenues rose 8 percent for the quarter, up to US$1.7 billion, while marketing services revenues rose $1.49 billion, a 7 percent increase. Net income, on t...

Answers Corp., which owns Answers.com, plans to acquire Dictionary.com for a cool US$100 million, the company announced Monday. Technically, Answers will buy Lexico Publishing Group, the owner of Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com and Reference.com In June, Lexico's sites attracted 11.5 million unique monthly users in the U.S., according to comScore Med...

Sun Microsystems is working on releasing an easy-to-install binary version of its OpenSolaris open source operating system with delivery planned for early 2008, the company told the press Thursday in a meeting in San Francisco. The idea is to deliver OpenSolaris in a packaged distribution method modeled after the ease of distribution used with Linux. The initiative is called "Project Indiana," and it's a key component of Sun's open source efforts. It, along with Sun's OpenSolaris.org community, is facing a mixed bag of challenge and opportunity...

This year, the world may see the results of a new experiment in selling online digital music, and major record label EMI is at the center of the testing. Sandwiched between the current market-dominating Apple iTunes music store and the Amazon.com DRM-free digital music store set to launch this fall, EMI is letting the two industry heavyweights sell its music without copy-protection schemes hobbling its songs...

Microsoft is in a tough position with its Xbox 360 gaming console and Xbox Live online service The Xbox 360 has outsold its key competitors, a position it attained in part by being the first to market by several months. However, since that time it has seen a disturbing number of 360 units die via a hardware failure....

In an interesting twist on browser-based security issues, security researchers said they have found a flaw in which Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) can cause Mozilla's Firefox to execute remote malicious code Security firm Secunia released an advisory Tuesday, ranking the flaw as highly critical. The vulnerability is confirmed on Firefox 2.0.0.4

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is working out the rules for what could be the most important radio spectrum auction for years to come. At stake is the right to use spectrum in the coveted 700 MHz bands, which are characterized by the ability to travel long distances and go through the walls of buildings The spectrum was previously used...

Microsoft has issued a statement about its position in regard to the Free Software Foundation's version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPL), which was crafted in part to protect users from possible Microsoft patent infringement lawsuits. Microsoft's stance? The company, in four paragraphs of text, essentially thumbs its nose at the GPL "Micro...

Three men in the UK, originally arrested on terrorism charges in October 2005, were sentenced Thursday to serve 24 years in prison after they admitted to using the Internet to incite murder Younes Tsouli, Waseem Mughal and Tariq Al-Daour initially denied the terrorism charges....

An Irish technology development company Steorn claims it can produce free, clean and constant energy without taking the energy from an external source. In effect, the company claims it has produced an energy-making machine it calls Orbo. Despite apparently violating fundamental laws of physics, Steorn planned to demonstrate its machine to the public Wednesday at the Kinetica Museum gallery in London...

After an unprecedented development process that brought four drafts in eighteen months, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has released the third version of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), the world's most popular free software license "Since we founded the free software movement over 23 years ago, the free software community has develope...

On the eve of Apple's big iPhone push, mobile communications market powerhouse Research In Motion (RIM) reported astoundingly strong BlackBerry sales. RIM's earnings were up 73 percent for the quarter ending June 2, beating expectations and surprising Wall Street The stock price surged more than twenty percent Friday, rising more than US$33 and rea...

In addition to its versions for Windows and Mac, Google has launched a Linux version of Google Desktop. The application lets users search both the Web and their own PC hard drive for Gmail, Web history, music, photos and other files "Since some Linux users are program developers, Google Desktop was designed with the ability to search source codes a...

For four years now, IBM's Blue Gene/L has remained king of the hill as far as supercomputers are concerned, according to listings from TOP500 Supercomputer Sites, an organization that ranks the world's most powerful systems. On Wednesday, Blue Gene/L again appeared at the top of the TOP500 list IBM, however, has another Blue Gene in the works that ...

Google launched a new program Tuesday that's designed to help nonprofit organizations around the world illustrate and share the work they do. Called "Google Earth Outreach," the program helps organizations get the resources, software and training they need to create compelling stories through Google Earth layers Google Earth is a free mapping and s...

Samsung Electronics is now mass-producing the industry's first 1.8-inch solid state drives (SSD) at a whopping 64 gigabytes, making the high-density flash-memory-based drives suitable for widespread ultra-portable laptop use "Flash-based memory drives represent the future of the laptop market," Rob Enderle, principal analyst for the Enderle Group, ...