Articles by Chris Maxcer

Joost, an Internet television service that promises high-quality streaming of licensed TV content, got a big hand Thursday from industry heavyweights CBS and Viacom. The two companies, along with three other venture capital firms, have invested a collective US$45 million, Joost reported Joost, which is still in its beta phase, says the funds are ea...

Leading scientific institutions from around the world have collaborated on one the largest Web projects to date: a global effort to document all 1.8 million named species of plants and animals on Earth in a free online resource called "Encyclopedia of Life." Similar to Wikipedia, the Encyclopedia of Life will allow users to add information and deta...

Sun Microsystems is previewing a new family of Java-based solutions for creating and deploying rich Internet applications (RIA) for use on mobile handsets, set-top boxes, PC desktops and anywhere else the Java Runtime Environment is deployed Sun previewed the solutions, organized under the name "JavaFX," at its JavaOne Conference in San Francisco T...

There are two main camps of software developers that dominate the world today: those that work primarily in a Microsoft .Net framework and those that work primarily in a J2EE (aka "Java EE") framework However, even this one-two punch of heavy-hitting frameworks comes with a caveat:...

Dell has jumped on board the Microsoft-Novell collaboration to deliver Suse Linux to enterprise customers The Microsoft-Novell agreement, announced last November, is designed to let the two companies jointly build, market and support solutions that improve interoperability between Microsoft Windows solutions and Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise-based...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a summary Friday of its latest report on global warming. The report, gleaned from the help of 2,000 scientists, calls for the world to cut emissions of CO2 and shift energy sources to renewable fuels The report also calls for the stabilization of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by 201...

On the surface, the recent brouhaha with Digg and the HD DVD encryption key posted on the site seems to be about cracking the code to let people copy movies. While most people may think digital rights management (DRM) is a pain in the butt and a waste of time in the effort to fight illegal copying for commercial gain, they tend to have little interest -- even the generally tech-savvy community of Digg users -- in learning how to copy their own HD DVDs...

In today's world of application development, software programmers, developers, analysts, engineers and architects face an ever-widening range of job roles and expectations. Organizations worldwide are asking more of these professionals, in ways rarely seen only a decade ago Software developers have found themselves stuck between the need for multil...

VMware has filed paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for its planned initial public offering The firm will offer 10 percent of its Class A common stock in the IPO, which will give shareholders of EMC, VMware's parent company, a boost and help VMware attract and retain the software industry's top talent, the company said....

IBM is working to turn its System z mainframe computer into an online 3-D gaming platform The idea is to merge the massive transaction and account-based scalability of the mainframe with the graphics power of the PlayStation 3, ultimately letting an organization create and run a virtual online environment like "World of Warcraft" or "Second Life," ...

A European team of astronomers has discovered what may be the most Earth-like planet outside of our solar system, potentially capable of having liquid water and extraterrestrial life The planet, Gliese 581 c, named after the red dwarf star Gliese 581 that it orbits every 13 days, is about 20.5 light years away from Earth, the scientists report. Loc...

A pair of NASA spacecraft have recorded the first 3-D images of the sun, giving scientists and space weather experts a much-improved ability to monitor and predict solar storms that can disrupt communications satellites, interfere with widely-used GPS systems, and knock out electrical power grids The two spacecraft, NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relatio...

The maker of the popular BlackBerry mobile e-mail device, Research In Motion (RIM), plans to let Windows Mobile-based devices run virtual BlackBerry applications. RIM will offer the new software solution later this year for select devices that run on Windows Mobile 6 Once installed, the software will give users a virtual BlackBerry application expe...

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG) filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Friday that details what they consider key privacy problems with Google's and DoubleClick's pending merger The online privacy advocate groups wa...

Internet search engine leader Google reported massive quarterly financial gains Thursday, posting a net income of US$1 billion in the first quarter of 2007, up from $592 million in the first quarter of 2006, and blowing past Wall Street's expectations Google's 69 percent growth far surpassed Yahoo's first quarter performance, also reported this wee...

Internet auction house eBay on Wednesday beat Wall Street estimates by delivering US$377.2 million in earnings for the first quarter of this year, a massive 52 percent leap Despite the strong performance, eBay shares struggled Thursday, falling around 85 cents, or 2.5 percent....

In the battle to bridge the world's digital divide, the world's largest software company will offer a special suite of Microsoft solutions to children in developing nations for a rock-bottom price of US$3. The program is an expansion of Microsoft's Unlimited Potential initiative and its Partners in Learning program Through the program, Microsoft wi...

Yahoo reported first quarter net earnings down 11 percent from Q1 of last year as the global Internet brand faces stiff competition from search-based advertising leader Google Google captured a first-place 48.3 percent of the U.S. search market as of March 2007, compared to Yahoo's second-place ranking of 27.5 percent, according to the latest data ...

With near-simultaneous announcements on Monday at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) trade show in Las Vegas, Microsoft and Adobe have started a turf war over the future of Internet video and next-generation rich Internet application (RIA) solutions On one hand, Microsoft announced Silverlight, which is a cross-platform browser plug-in ...

Microsoft on Monday unveiled Silverlight, a new browser plug-in designed to compete head-to-head with Adobe's Flash plug-in. Announced at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) trade show in Las Vegas, Microsoft says the new cross-platform application will let Web publishers deliver rich interactive applications (RIA) and video media that will run on both Mac OS X and Windows PCs via a variety of browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari...