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What a difference a few years make. Back when Al Gore ran for president in 2000, experts and laypeople alike engaged in lively debates about whether climate change was real or imagined. Two elections later -- after a mammoth public education effort by that same Al Gore -- most people believe that the globe is indeed warming up. The problem remains what to do about it...

Open source software is often an unsung hero in the online gaming universe. Game engines are complex applications with core functionalities provided by numerous modules. These include arendering engine for 2-D or 3-D graphics and a physics engine or collision detection and response calculator. In addition, game developers have to provide for sound, scripting, animation, artificial intelligence, networking, streaming, memory management, threading and a scene graph...

Chipmaker Intel said this week that despite its record US$10.2 billion in revenue for the third quarter, the company is worried that the global economic crisis will affect future performance. Despite such a general malaise across the industry, however, there is some very good news on the tech front Buried under the cloud of economic fears, bandwid...

Research conducted at the University of Washington in Seattle suggests that clinical applications that can assist people paralyzed by spinal cord injuries or neurological diseases are perhaps five years away from realization In a study published by Nature, scientists Eberhard E. Fetz, Chet T. Moritz and Steve I. Perlmutter demonstrated for the fir...

Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia reported a 30 percent decrease in third-quarter earnings and a 5 percent drop in sales on Thursday However, the company was able to improve gross margins at a time when the global economy is faltering and spending on consumer electronics is decreasing in the United States and in Western Europe, two of Nokia's bigges...

Adobe released the 10th version of its Flash Player Wednesday. Flash Player 10 includes new features and enhancements that give Web developers greater creative control when designing their interactive content and video "This is going to be a particularly fun release for the Flash community, just because it enables such expressive capabilities that ...

Online auction house and retailer eBay announced a profitable third quarter on Thursday but warned an already-volatile Wall Street that continued weakness in consumer spending would hurt sales throughout the rest of the year The company reported Q3 earnings of US$492.2 million, compared to a loss of $935.6 million during the same period a year ago....

Google's first Android phone has finally made its way into long-waiting hands. The T-Mobile G1 device, expected to be in stores within the coming week, is drawing mixed reviews from early users. The closest thing to a sweeping overview might be that it is a powerful device with a few flaws but plenty of positives and potential, some of which isn't yet achieved...

Technology research giant Gartner released a list on Wednesday of the top 10 technologies that will dominate the landscape for the next three years The release comes at a jittery time for technology stocks and early stage startups alike. The tech-heavy Nasdaq National Market plummeted 8.47 percent Wednesday and was down another 1.6 percent in early...

Mozilla on Tuesday released the first beta of the next version of its browser, Firefox 3.1. The beta includes an enhanced Smart Location Bar, a new tab interface and what should be a faster JavaScript engine, dubbed "TraceMonkey." Developers also included improved Web standards in the Gecko layout engine; added support for CSS (cascading style she...

Among dreamy startups and salty e-commerce veterans alike, Zappos.com appears to be the golden grail -- certainly one blessed, at least, with heavenly rewards. "Zappos is the Amazon of the shoe business, and its model is extremely difficult to mimic," Gene Alvarez, vice president of research at Gartner (and former employee of shoe-biz powerhouse, Nine West Group), told the E-Commerce Times...

Why do your best laid plans often go unfulfilled? You have put the right people in the right jobs, empowered them to achieve, drafted an excellent plan, and got the necessary buy-in and funding. Yet somehow things went into the ditch -- and now the project is late and over budget, delivering a poor return on investment. The fact is, knowing the...

As more business-critical applications are being deployed, organizations are increasingly looking to gain visibility into network and application performance and, more importantly, improve usability of this information. Visibility into network and application performance has been identified as one of the top concerns for end-user organizations in the coming year, according to the September Aberdeen report, "The Value of Network and Application Visibility."

Searching the Internet and reading things online are more than just a way to pass the time, according to a new study released by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). A research team headed by Dr. Gary Small, a professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, found that when Web-savvy older adults surf the ...

The Federal Trade Commission has essentially shut down the largest spam operation in the world, freezing the assets of two of its accused ringleaders Lance Atkinson, a New Zealand citizen living in Australia, and Jody Smith of Texas, deceptively marketed a variety of products through spam messages, including a male-enhancement pill, prescription dr...

Semiconductor chip giant Intel reported better-than-expected financial results for the third quarter late Tuesday, but it wasn't enough to buoy the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company's stock or inject any new life into the broader chip market Net income at Intel rose 12 percent year-over-year to US$2.01 billion. However, top-line revenue rose just 1...

Not that it's a done deal like the title might suggest, but Siebel seems to be reconstituting itself into a rival power in the CRM market once again. After Oracle OpenWorld, I made the observation that Siebel appeared to be returning to its old prominence. The introduction of new products based on Web 2.0 ideas, the continued strength in all glo...

The Hacker Underground is dead. Long live the Hacker Underground! In the most recent issue of Phrack Magazine, I read an article titled "The Underground Myth," that makes a number of astute points about the demise of the hacking scene of the last few decades....

The market to distribute premium video content (mainly TV episodes and feature-length movies) is currently going through one of its most dynamic periods, as experimentation with business models, delivery mechanisms and consumer tastes is in full swing. In the age of online entertainment, consumers get virtually unlimited choice of content and the ...

Search engine giants Google and Yahoo are in talks with the U.S. Department of Justice in the hopes of alleviating regulators' antitrust concerns regarding their pending online ad sharing deal Reports that the three sides were meeting first surfaced in the Wall Street Journal early Tuesday....