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On the very day that "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" officially topped video game rental charts, other headlines point to research into the impact of such violent games on user behavior Indiana University (IU) School of Medicine researchers have already determined in previous studies that exposure to violent media might affect the brains of youths ...

Microsoft is aggressively pursuing Novell NetWare customers with discounts, new migration tools and services for Windows Server 2003 Industry analysts called the strategy a smart one, indicating that the majority of enterprise NetWare users -- at a crossroads of moving to SuSE Linux with Novell or migrating to another platform that is most likely W...

IBM is using its influence in the IT arena to create the world's largest-ever grid computing system. The company envisions 10 million participants donating computing cycles to the World Community Grid, which is designed for use in scientific and environmental research projects The Human Proteome Folding Project will be the first to take advantage o...

Hoping to secure large corporate customers by addressing one of the fastest-growing Internet-related security threats, McAfee has launched an enterprise software product aimed specifically at identifying and eradicating spyware, adware and related programs McAfee's Anti-Spyware Enterprise Edition Module comes just two weeks after rival Computer Ass...

Your most critical business decisions often come down to prices: how much to charge and how much to pay. Prices have been driven down in the South Asian call center industry in the last two years, thanks to a flood of new entrants into the industry, a glut of low-end capacity, and improvements in telecommunications services -- particularly managed VoIP services and hosted call center technology from vendors such as Stratasoft, Five9 and TelephonyAtWork...

East Coast grocer Stop & Shop has introduced shopping carts that give consumers Internet accessibility at their fingertips The smart carts, from IBM and Cuesol of Quincy, Massachusetts, feature on-board IBM touchscreen computers that double as personal assistants when the laser scanner on the cart reads an individual shopper's loyalty card. The car...

Back in 1976, Bill Gates wrote an open letter to hobbyists. He asked, "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put three years into programming, finding all the bugs, documenting his product, and distribute it for free?" Today, Gates has to eat those words because the open-source movement has proven that it is possib...

Corporations often need more wide area network (WAN) bandwidth but are deterred by its high cost and slow speed. Pricing for these lines runs from hundreds to thousands of dollars per month, and typically the links deliver 1.5 mbps (megabits per second) of throughput Now a small but growing number of firms are opting to use wireless LANs (WLANs) fo...

The move to add tiny radio antennas on shipments of pharmaceuticals will not be enough to prevent counterfeiting and tampering, analysts said The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and several drug makers announced they would be putting RFID-tagged labels on medicine bottles beginning with the impotency drug Viagra, which is heavily counterfeited, ...

Dell and Microsoft have struck a partnership aimed at making it easier and faster for enterprises to update their server software with security patches and new releases The companies said they will work to merge Dell's OpenManage 4 systems management software and Microsoft's Systems Management Server 2003 to produce a tool that enables administrato...

Yahoo announced enhancements to its e-mail service, adding search, morestorage and its DomainKeys sender authentication technology -- which is alsobeing deployed by Internet service provider EarthLink in a test roll-out While the news of the DomainKeys deployment was welcomed by most, therewere also calls for the different methods of validating e-m...

Dell announced today its next generation of blade server, two years after it first ventured into the market with an offering that did not take off The PowerEdge 1855 blades, based on dual Xeon processors, will fit into a new 7U chassis built by Dell to hold up to 10 dual-processor servers. Dell has taken its traditional approach with the blades, en...

On the heels of Red Hat's foray into China last week, Microsoft today announced that it will hire hundreds of new employees at its Indian campus next year Microsoft currently employs 800 people at its US$400 million, 28-acre campus just outside India's high-tech hub of Hyderabad in Manikonda. Company executives said the hiring spree is aimed at lev...

In separate moves that suggest strong desire among media giants to position themselves in the online news and information fields, Dow Jones agreed to buy MarketWatch in a deal worth US$519 million, while Yahoo announced it had hired a former Wall Street Journal Online executive to head its own news division Dow Jones will pay $18 per share in cash ...

The speculation is over. Sun is set to release a new version of its Solaris operating system today, and Solaris 10, the newest version of its Unix-based operating system, will soon be available for the first time ever as a free open-source product Sun spent billions of dollars developing the code but will now trade licensing fees for support packag...

Today is the federally mandated deadline for investment companies and other publicly owned firms to be in compliance with internal auditing controls stipulated by the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act of 2004. However, it appears many companies might miss the deadline Under terms of the SOX law, otherwise known as the Public Company Accounting Reform and In...

In retrospect, it seems obvious to match the capabilities of Windows with secure messaging software. However, in 1995, when Windows NT first burst into the marketplace, IT managers at first did not have many -- if any -- options to help their users easily and safely communicate with each other This was the challenge facing John Davies. Having devel...

Desperately seeking their future, African countries that virtually no Western commercial software vendors have cared about in the past are turning to free and open software. They are doing so at a pace just quick enough to alarm some commercial software vendors, who fear the prospect of an entire continent dominated by free software in the future I...

The two major initiatives in the consumer market this year have to do with digital media, and they are from Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft's is the broad Media Center Edition that encompasses the home and provides your music on a variety of products, while Apple's is more targeted at just PCs (both Apple and Windows) and the iPod. The two companies overlap in only one area -- the Windows PC -- and even here they differ in approach. Apple is mostly music (although it just added still images to the iPod) and Microsoft has consistently pushed the envelope with music, pictures and video...

Is Yahoo going Hollywood? It's a question that analysts are increasingly asking after the Sunnyvale, California, Web portal's hiring two weeks ago of Lloyd Braun, a former chairman of ABC television. He is charged with overseeing Yahoo's entertainment and media properties, including movies, music, gaming, sports, news and finance....