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Spend a few minutes at Microsoft's Hohm Web site, enter a few details about your house, and it will spit out a series of recommendations about how best you can reduce your energy consumption, and maybe save some money in the process Next year, it will be able to help some car owners to manage the power consumption of their vehicles, as well....

The right-leaning Drudge Report made it a habit in November and December to trumpet any and all headlines relating to the "Climategate" controversy -- the story involving UK scientist Phil Jones, the head of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, whose emails attacking critics of global warming found their way onto the Internet after his account was hacked...

After six years of battle, a federal jury on Tuesday settled the longstanding SCO Group v. Novell case by ruling that Novell owns the rights to the Unix operating system In 2003, the SCO Group began campaigning to get Linux users to pay it license fees, arguing that unspecified SCO intellectual property had been improperly included in Linux. SCO f...

Google, AOL, AT&T, the ACLU, Microsoft, Salesforce.com and other members of a newly formed coalition called "Digital Due Process" are proposing that the federal government update laws on government access to email and private files stored by third-party service providers in the cloud -- or any other storage system. Currently, third-party storage o...

IUGO Mobile has used Apple's iPhone to dial up a measure of success with its smartphone-based games. The development company, which makes popular titles "Zombie Attack!" "Toy Bot Diaries" and "Implode," was the first gaming outlet to get its own featured section on the iTunes for PC Store. IUGO's games are used for demo purposes in Apple Stores, and "Toy Bot Diaries" was part of the montage of games used in the first iPod touch gaming-centric TV commercial...

Climate change, peak oil, and precarious food systems seem finally to have entered the realm of relatively mainstream discourse. Corporate employees now routinely discuss their gardening plans and dreams of a hobby farm over lunch. Photographs of whole foods guru Michael Pollan grace the covers of popular news magazines. This time around, though, urban and rural homesteaders are learning about backyard chickens and succession planting not from tattered photocopies of Mother Earth News but from organizations whose business is reaching and serving this growing niche...

Over the last couple of weeks, I have maintained radio silence, hardly blogging as I tried to prepare a manuscript for publication. This piece is not the usual analyst fare with charts and graphs and interpretations. It's a simple book of my writings from the last year and a half Many things came to the forefront during the collating process. Fo...

The file manager utility more than any other system app on anycomputing platform is the workhorse of daily computing tasks. Linuxusers have numerous file managers as choices. Depending on the distro, usually one or two default apps are preinstalled -- but thesemight not be the best options Thunar and Rox Filer offer flexibility and features not fou...

Silicon Valley is known for innovative ideas in technology, and now some of the area's greatest minds have come up with a new way to solve one of their biggest operational problems: securing foreign talent. It's called the "startup visa" and it's getting a lot of attention in both California and D.C., because it would help create new jobs The idea...

It's been a couple of years since AMD had to delay shipments of its buggy quad-core Barcelona server chip to manufacturers, costing the company market share, stock value and reputation Now, the No. 2 chip vendor hopes to come roaring back with the world's first 8- and 12-core x86 processors and a host of new relationships with manufacturers....

Sometime this year, Apple will almost certainly unveil an iPhone compatible with Verizon Wireless' -- and Sprint's, for that matter -- CDMA-based network. Apple is also working on another GSM iteration of its iconic device, which will be released by AT&T later this year, according to The Wall Street Journal, which broke the story on Monday.

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, finally smashed two beams of protons together at high speed on Tuesday after a couple of failed starts CERN was trying to get the two proton beams to collide at an energy level of 7 trillion electron volts (TeV), but problems with the electrical system forced the sci...

Facebook is proposing another round of changes to its privacy policy. The updates are meant to better explain certain features, said Facebook Deputy General Counsel Michael Richter in a blog post -- such as why invitations that non-users receive to join Facebook sometimes include the names of persons other than the one who sent the invitation. (It...

So-called smart grids are among the first real-world examples of what expansive IT vendor initiatives like IBM's Smarter Planet envision. Just what are smart grids? Designed for deployment by utility companies, smart grids incorporate sensors embedded in electric, gas and water meters to communicate usage and performance data to central data centers.

Part 1 of this series on getting started with CRM addresses factors to consider when deciding whether the time is right to take the plunge.Part 2 offers advice on how to choose the right CRM tool.Part 3 provides some guidance on preparing for contract negotiations.Part 4 tackles the all-important step of embarking on an implementation.Part 5 considers how to rescue a project at risk of failure.Part 6 suggests some effective ways to get your sales staff enthusiastic about CRM...

In what will surely be a blow to Linux fans the world over, Sony is dropping support for the open operating system on its PlayStation 3 The move will take effect Thursday with the release of a firmware update to version 3.21. That new version will disable the "Install Other OS" feature that was available on older PS3 systems -- those released prior...

Part 1 of this series discusses the different approaches being taken to design more efficient urban landscapes Technologists tend to think of so-called smart cities as being tied together by technology. Their focus is on using technology to change our lives and make cities more efficient and smarter.

Australia's proposed Internet filtering plan has already drawn criticism from censorship foes around the globe, and the U.S. Department of State recently weighed in with its own concerns The plan, which was announced in December, would require that Australian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) filter out a range of content, including child sexual ab...

Victorinox, maker of the Swiss Army Knife, has come out with a model that would make James Bond proud: a pocket knife with a super-secure USB stick. ...

When Microsoft first launched its Bing search engine less than a year ago, the company promised to map out a strategy that involved more frequent updates and feature additions. This week, the company reiterated its commitment to that road map with the announcement of some new tweaks and technology integration starting immediately and continuing into the summer -- tweaks including, of course, mapping in search results...