Articles by Richard Adhikari

Researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have created a reasoning virtual 4-year-old child The "child," named "Eddie," can reason about his own beliefs to draw conclusions in a manner that matches human children of that age....

Every time you go online, you leave electronic footprints -- and someone is following them When you display a page, enter a search query, play a video or click on an ad online, that information is logged by the servers of the companies that own the site or serve the video or ad or search results....

Everywhere you look today, you're hit right between the eyes with an URL. They pop up in TV ads, in ads on the big screen, on billboards, posters, soup cans, cereal boxes, on the sides of buses -- just about anywhere If you see one that's interesting, and have pen and paper to hand, you may jot it down. But what if you're walking or driving? How wo...

Xandros, which makes intuitive Linux solutions and tools to manage mixed environments, announced two new products that will make it easier for Windows systems administrators to manage Linux platforms in their IT environment One is the Xandros BridgeWays Management Console for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The other is Opsi4xandros, an all-in-one soluti...

German police raided 51 booths of companies suspected of showing pirated products at electronics show CeBIT 2008, which runs through Sunday in Hannover, Germany More than 180 police and customs officials participated in the swoop. They removed 68 cartons filled with devices, documents and advertising material....

Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 8 beta 1, four months ahead of schedule. The browser is aimed at developers, the software giant said, but anyone can download the beta from its sites. It was originally scheduled to be released in June Microsoft announced the release at its annual Mix 08 conference, which runs through Friday at the Venetian ...

Five years after it began work on Singularity, an operating system research project focused on constructing dependable systems, Microsoft has released a research development kit (RDK) to the academic and research community The terms of the license make Singularity free software, not open source software....

In Part 1 of this five-part series, we define virtualization; in Part 2, we look at the business drivers for virtualization. Now we will look at the challenges enterprises face when they virtualize their IT environment So, we know virtualizing the IT system will save a lot of time, money and effort, and we know there are lots of tools out there we ...

Semiconductor giant Intel has lowered its profitability forecast, sending stock prices tumbling across the board The company cut its first-quarter gross margin forecast from 56 percent to 54 percent "due to lower than expected prices for NAND flash memory chips," Intel said. All other expectations remained unchanged....

Drupal, the wildly popular open source social publishing system which has been downloaded more than 2 million times since it was released in 2001, will soon be available as a commercial distribution The news was announced at DrupalCon Boston 2008, a convention of Drupal users, being held in Boston March 3-6....

Google is working with homeless shelters in San Francisco to let them offer free phone numbers and voicemail boxes to their clients for life The aim is to let shelters provide these facilities directly to their clients instead of requiring the homeless to register individually for a free phone number and voicemail box as they do now....

The European Union has slapped Microsoft with a record US$1.35 billion fine "Microsoft was the first company in 50 years of EU competition policy that the Commission has had to fine for failure to comply with an antitrust decision," said European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes....

Part 1 of this five-part series defines the various types of virtualization. This installment looks at the business reasons for virtualizing your IT system. How will virtualization contribute to your top or bottom line? How much can you save? The function of IT is to support business, and every IT decision must be business-driven. So, what kind of ...

Vox populi vox dei -- the voice of the people is the voice of God -- was supposed to represent democracy in action. Until now, however, the true state of democracy was perhaps best expressed by the saying "Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one." The Internet and associated technologies are changing that....

Google is joining five other companies to lay a 6,200-mile undersea cable linking the U.S. and Japan Its partners in the so-called Unity cable project are telecommunications providers Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI, Pacnet and SingTel....

For a couple of hours on Sunday, access to YouTube worldwide was cut, the result of the Pakistani government's banning YouTube in the country Access to YouTube elsewhere was restored after two hours or so, but the question on everyone's minds is, can this happen again?...

The European Union is looking at Microsoft's vow to commit to openness and interoperability with a jaundiced eye The EU's executive branch, the European Commission, will welcome "any move towards genuine interoperability," it said, while pointing out that Microsoft had made "at least four similar statements" in the past on this topic....

AMD has open sourced more than 3,000 routines in its AMD Performance Library for multi-threaded programming These routines, which will make it easier to build media and other applications for multi-core processors, have been posted under the Apache license on SourceForge.net....

What is virtualization anyway? This five-part series on a trend that is reaching into every corner of the technology landscape addresses that fundamental question, along with many of the complex issues that flow from it The short answer is, virtualization is separating the physical layer (the servers or PCs or whatever box you're running your opera...

Confusion is swirling around Microsoft's bid for Yahoo. After having been twice rebuffed, Microsoft reportedly is planning to authorize a proxy fight this week Meanwhile, institutional shareholders are about to lock horns over whether Microsoft should up its bid of US$31 a share for Yahoo....